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HILLSBORO, Ore. - Intel was never one of those technology companies where employees had beanbag chairs, designer desks and pinball machines. Its offices were known for their endless rows of gray cubicles, low ceilings and fluorescent lighting. For decades it resisted any changes to its office environment. In the last two years, however, Intel has quietly been trying to inject a little more fun into its offices and make them places where employees can be more collaborative. The company has remade one million square feet of office space thus far in a sweeping redesign.

Virtual teams cross three types of boundaries: Time, space and organization. Understanding those variables is crucial to deal with challenges of the different team types emerging from these complexity factors.

Virtual open space activities

From the post: "We spend our lives inside buildings, our thoughts shaped by their walls. Nevertheless, there's surprisingly little research on the psychological implications of architecture. How do different spaces influence cognition? Is there an ideal kind of architectural structure for different kinds of thinking?"

Report on the office of the future

An interesting news article reporting on a study about conceptions of space and time held by an Amazonian tribe

Global virtual teams are internationally distributed groups of people with an organizational mandate to make or implement decisions with international components and implications. They are typically assigned tasks that are strategically important and highly complex. They rarely meet in person, conducting almost all of their interaction and decision making using communications technology. Although they play an increasingly important role in multinational organizations, little systematic is known about their dynamics or effectiveness. This study built a grounded theory of global virtual team processes and performance over time. We built a template based on Adaptive Structuration Theory (DeSanctis and Poole 1994) to guide our research, and we conducted a case study, observing three global virtual teams over a period of 21 months. Data were gathered using multiple methods, and qualitative methods were used to analyze them and generate a theory of global virtual team dynamics and effectiveness. First, we propose that effective global virtual team interaction comprises a series of communication incidents, each configured by aspects of the team's structural and process elements. Effective outcomes were associated with a fit among an interaction incident's form, decision process, and complexity. Second, effective global virtual teams sequence these incidents to generate a deep rhythm of regular face-to-face incidents interspersed with less intensive, shorter incidents using various media. These two insights are discussed with respect to other literature and are elaborated upon in several propositions. Implications for research and practice are also outlined.