The Handbook of High Performance Virtual Teams: A Toolkit for Collaborating Across Boundaries

Chapter 19. Tools for Effective Virtual Team Start-Ups

Kimball Fisher

There is little disagreement about whether virtual teams are more difficult to manage than colocated ones. Sharing all of the challenges of teams that see each other regularly, virtual teams share few of the advantages. It is not unusual, for example, for members of a virtual team to go long periods without the powerful informal networking that normally occurs when people casually run into each other in the shared hallways and lunchrooms of a brick-and-mortar workplace (Fisher & Fisher, 1998). Without as many opportunities to pass along the tacit knowledge that often differentiates more effective teams from less effective ones, virtual teams must work harder to achieve their ...