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

The Challenges of Virtual Teaming

Jill Nemiro, Lori Bradley, Michael Beyerlein, Susan Beyerlein

Collaboration, defined as "the collective work of two or more individuals where the work is undertaken with a sense of shared purpose and direction that is attentive, responsive, and adaptive to the environment" (Beyerlein & Harris, 2004, p. 18), is a robust tool for getting things done, creating change, and extending resources to their furthest imaginable limits. More and more, organizations are relying on collaborative work to integrate and align their human resources, better tap into the external environment, adapt a flexible stance, and ultimately achieve a competitive advantage in the fast-paced global marketplace.

We are witnessing a conscious transformation ...