The impact of virtuality on teams

Abstract

In the first part of my dissertation I have described the main reasons of the growing presence of teams inside firms and organizations. Moreover, I have illustrated the team definition, its main characteristics and the different team typologies described by the literature. The main focus of my thesis regards virtual teams. This kind of team has received an increasing interest during past years, but, after a literature review, I can affirmed that there is not an agreed definition of virtual teams. As a consequence, I have deeply described which are the different points of view in defining virtual teams. Moreover, I wanted to examine in depth which are the main issues that, according to the literature, members of virtual teams can face compared with the so called “traditional teams”. Since there is not an agreed definition of virtual teams, I have decided to support the definition that affirmed that virtual teams cannot be strictly defined as different type of team, instead, there is a “virtuality” dimension in every team. My decision to support this definition is due to the fact that in nowadays teams there is a wide use of virtual tools in every team in order to communicate, to share materials, to coordinate work etcetera. Thus, there is a “virtuality” dimension (that can be high or low) present in every team. As a consequence, the last part of my thesis focused on an analysis of how virtuality impacts teams performance. My analysis was supported by surveys that I submitted to team composed by students but also by people working in a firm.