ABSTRACT
There is an ongoing transformation in organizations toward developing comprehensive team-based systems (Townsend, DeMarie, & Hendrickson, 1996; Ulrich, 1998). Indeed, for many organizations today, teams have become the primary unit of performance (Katzenbach & Smith, 1993; Mohrman, Cohen, & Mohrman, 1995). Some of the dramatic and ongoing transformations in organizational design and structure have been made possible through the availability of collaborative information technologies. These technologies have enabled organizations to rapidly form teams that are not restricted by geography, time, or organizational boundaries. Advances in computing and telecommunications technologies have allowed many organizations to deploy teams consisting of members at distant locations and, in some instances, other organizations to work together both synchronously and asynchronously to accomplish their tasks. These new teams have been called virtual teams (Lipnack & Stamps, 1997; Townsend et al., 1996; Townsend, DeMarie, & Hendrickson, 1998).
