ABSTRACT
Since the industrial revolution, most organizations have been built around the model of bringing employees to centralized locations to perform work with a group of peers under the immediate supervision and control of management. For almost three centuries, the general assumption among both managers and their employees has been that the employer assigns a place where the employee performs his or her work. Today, advances in telecommunications technology and transportation have freed many workers from the traditional model of a fixed place of work in two major ways. First, many Americans have become telecommuters — spending at least a part of their regular business hours either in home offices, satellite offices or neighborhood work centers close to their homes, at customer sites, or on the road. Second, it has become increasingly common for work to be performed by virtual teams — where the membership of the team is not limited by the physical location of an employee’s primary workplace or a team member’s functional unit within the organization.
