ABSTRACT
Despite the growing importance of virtual teams in modern organizations and the fundamental role played by discursive practices in enacting such teams across time, space, and cultural boundaries, the burgeoning literature on virtuality and virtual teams tends to be predominantly confined to management, computer science, and information systems journals; whereas, communication research has paid scant attention to virtual team interaction and processes. As a result, such research tends to take a functionalist approach, which regards communication as a variable, rather than examining how virtual teamwork is constituted through communicative practices. This chapter synthesizes the existing research on virtual teams and provides a critical reassessment of the literature from a constitutive perspective. We propose a conceptual framework that situates communication processes centrally as an alternative to the dominant inputs–processes–outcomes model and suggest a programmatic agenda of future research for communication scholars across a variety of areas—organizational, interpersonal, group, mediated, and intercultural communication.
