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Summary: "Most teams underperform. Yours can beat the odds. If you need the best practices and ideas for superior team building--but don't have time to find them--this book is for you. Here are 10 inspiring and useful perspectives, all in one place. This collection of HBR articles will help you: boost team performance through mutual accountability, motivate large, diverse groups to tackle complex projects, increase groups' emotional intelligence, reverse the fortunes of a struggling team, prevent decision deadlock, extract results from a bunch of touchy superstars, fight constructively with top-management colleagues, and ensure productivity in far-flung teams."

Summary: "The scores of successful virtual teams the authors examined didn't have many of the psychological and practical obstacles that plagued their more traditional, face-to-face counterparts. Team members felt freer to contribute--especially outside their established areas of expertise. The fact that such groups could not assemble easily actually made their projects go faster, as people did not wait for meetings to make decisions, and individuals, in the comfort of their own offices, had full access to their files and the complementary knowledge of their local colleagues. Reaping those advantages, though, demanded shrewd management of a virtual team's work processes and social dynamics. Rather than depend on videoconferencing or e-mail, which could be unwieldy or exclusionary, successful virtual teams made extensive use of sophisticated online team rooms, where everyone could easily see the state of the work in progress, talk about the work in ongoing threaded discussions, and be reminded of decisions, rationales, and commitments. Differences were most effectively hashed out in teleconferences, which team leaders also used to foster group identity and solidarity."

From the post: "These virtual teams, largely composed of people who have never met, were not only productive but also more innovative than "face-to-face teams." "They make decisions faster with more input from others and develop policies that are implemented worldwide with fewer problems than conventional teams," said Malhotra."

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.

More structure can be better than more freedom to foster collaboration. Yet, it is not the goals a team leader needs to define but the roles of each team member need to be clarified so they are well understood by all.

In a lightweight study of virtual teams, Stanford management science researcher Pamela Hinds found that 6 months after virtual team members participated in an intense week-long team-building retreat there was zero correlation to their ability to work together. Hinds believes that in order to increase a group's relational coordination or ability to problem-solve through mutual respect and open communication, members need to "know-who" each other are in their work contexts. Bringing people who don't usually see each other to do team-building exercises in a neutral hotel doesn't help because Hinds points out, "the truth is we don't work in neutral territory." She emphasizes, "Learning to work together is learning how people work, not just what kind of beer do you like," even though she adds, "that's useful information."

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 teams, although relatively new to the global business landscape, are already recognized as a boon to international organizations. Without the time, cost and hazards of travel, groups can now share information, chat, innovate and make decisions together. Creating effective virtual teams has proved to be more difficult than expected. Managers cannot simply create high-performance by assigning members and 'letting them run'. Without careful structuring, support and attention to processes, virtual teams do not achieve their potential and may not even get off the ground. Here we focus on four of the most important challenges: effective communication, relationship building, managing conflicts and leadership.

Framework for collaboration in distributed teams

How to structure a virtual team and the role of social interaction in distributed work contexts

Tools that provide the water cooler function in a distributed team

From Wikibooks - quite a good summary of challenges and solutions for virtual teams

Juliane Neumann zum Thema virtuelle Zusammenarbeit: Thesen zum Gelingen

Artikel in German

Hay Group did a survey on virtual teams: only 34% of the participants were happy how their companies appreciate the challenges they face when they work virtually.

Deploying Far-Flung Teams: A Guidebook for Managers by Ann Majchrzak and Arvind Malhotra May 9, 2003

an informal paper on trust in high performance virtual teams