Exploring Major Factors Affecting Virtual Team Performance

Abstract

Increasing global operations of companies and advances in communication technologies in the last two decades have led companies to create virtual team, in which employees work more productively and cost-effectively from different locations. This situation required virtual team leaders to have a different perspective and management approach than the leaders who manage teams in the usual offices. Performance management is one of the vital tasks of virtual team leaders and is a multidimensional research topic for researchers interested in virtual team management. Knowing the determinants of performance will be useful in quality decision-making, problem-solving, and many other managerial processes. This research aims to explore major factors affecting virtual team performance by using a systematic literature review methodology that includes more than one hundred scientific articles. Findings of this study suggest that these factors are leadership, communication, collaboration, cohesion, commitment, conflict, interpersonal relations, knowledge sharing, feedback, trust, diversity, recognition, and empowerment.