Changing Digital Age in the Wake of COVID-19

Virtual teams play a crucial role in today’s knowledge-based organisation for overcoming challenges in our dynamic world, especially in the current situation of the COVID-19 pandemic. Teams play a key role in today’s knowledge-based organization for overcoming challenges in our dynamic world. Drawing on social information processing theory, this study explores the effect of members’ humility and team environment within a leaderless team mainly based on virtual platforms. Their impacts on shared leadership, relationship conflict and team and individual performance were investigated. Surveying 219 students forming 61 virtual leaderless teams, our findings showed that a high level of humility and a positive team environment can help to improve shared leadership within a team, which contributes to team performance. Moreover, both humility and team environment have a negative relationship with relationship conflict, which depressed both team and individual performance. Our analysis also indicated that humility positively interacts with team environment on shared leadership.

Virtual Team Leadership, Operation, and Technology Deployment

The COVID-19 situation has shown many leaders that their face-to-face meetings leadership style may well now be a thing of the past. Tech-savvy companies are now deploying new technologies to support the creation and leadership of virtual teams, working remotely in different locations around the globe. This presents a range of new challenges for both project leaders and team members, who must now adopt new ways of working. Using an inductive approach based on an analysis of relevant literature, online surveys, and in-depth interviews with project leaders and other practitioners, this chapter examines the transitioning to virtual team leadership and operation, identifies critical success factors, and discusses the facilitating role of new technologies. An operational model (V-CORPS) to guide the building and operation of virtual teams is developed and explained with the aim of increasing the flexibility and efficiency of virtual project teams and establishing a checklist of action points for team building and leading.

Media Richness, Knowledge Sharing, and Computer Programming by Virtual Software Teams

Software programming is a task with high analyzability. However, knowledge sharing is an intricate part of the software programming process. Today, new media platforms have been adopted to enable knowledge sharing between virtual teams. Taking into consideration the high task analyzability and the task characteristics involved in software development, the question is if the media richness of the current media platform is effective in enabling knowledge sharing among these virtual teams? An exploratory research was conducted on a software company in Denmark. The data was gathered was analyzed qualitatively using narrative analysis. This paper concludes, based on the case being investigated, that rich media does not fit the task characteristics of a software programmer. It further concludes that Media richness does affect knowledge sharing in these virtual teams. This is because the current lean media actually enables knowledge sharing as it fits the core characteristics of the software programming process.

Team Dispersion, Emergent States, and Performance in Virtual IT Service Provisioning Teams

Today, virtual teams composed by dispersed team members relying on computer-supported collaborative work are common in the information technology (IT) service provisioning industry. Despite the increasing interest in virtual team research, there is a limited understanding of a multidimensional view of team dispersion and its effect on the performance of virtual teams via the team´s socioemotional states. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of team distribution and variety of work practices on the performance of virtual IT service provisioning teams via the emergent states of trust and cohesiveness. To this aim, an input-process-output framework was adopted to develop a conceptual model and a survey with IT service provisioning professionals was conducted. The results suggest that a variety of work practices constitutes a barrier to the performance of virtual IT service provisioning teams; and that trust and cohesiveness are important mediators in this cause-effect relationship.