Addressing Virtual Work Challenges: Learning From the Field

ABSTRACT

Companies increasingly rely on virtual teams. Despite numerous studies examining the challenges of geographically dispersed work, the findings are often mixed. The purpose of this article is to identify themes of challenges associated with virtual collaborations based on academic literature and do a gap analysis with industry trends. First, we identify five overarching categories of virtual team challenges based on reviewing the latest trends in the academic literature: trust and relationships, communication and knowledge sharing, perceptions and decision making, leadership, and diversity. Second, we utilize these categories to qualitatively code and analyze the company data from the Fortune Best Places to Work surveys from 2014 to 2017, using the document analysis technique. Our contribution is to identify similarities and differences in scholarly and industry approaches to addressing virtual teamwork challenges and thus highlight opportunities for development and future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtual teams
• field-based solutions
• document analysis

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julia Eisenberg

Julia Eisenberg is an assistant professor in the Department of Management and Management Science at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business. Her research interests include leadership, innovation, and collaborative processes among geographically distributed colleagues. Prior to getting her PhD from Rutgers University, she worked on Wall Street in information technology and finance for a decade. She can be reached at [email protected].

Aparna Krishnan

Aparna Krishnan is an instructor at Georgia State University, Robinson College of Business. She received a PhD in organizational behavior from Rutgers University, New Jersey, and her research focuses on negotiations and decision making, virtual teams, and mediated communication. She can be reached at [email protected].