Virtual teams i. There has been a multitude of studies examining the difficulties faced by collaborations and use of technology in various narrow contexts. However, there has been little work in examining the challenges faced by virtual teams and their use of technology to mitigate issues. To address this issue, a literature review was performed to highlight the collaboration challenges experienced by virtual teams and existing mitigation strategies.
In this review, a well-planned search strategy was utilized to identify a total of relevant studies, primarily focusing on technology use. The physical factors relating to distance are tightly coupled with the cognitive, social, and emotional challenges faced by virtual teams. However, based on research topics in the selected studies, we separate challenges as belonging to five categories: geographical distance, temporal distance, perceived distance, the configuration of dispersed teams, and diversity of workers.
In addition, findings from this literature review expose opportunities for research, such as resolving discrepancies regarding the effect of tightly coupled work on collaboration and the effect of temporal dispersion on coordination costs.
Finally, we use these results to discuss opportunities and implications for designing groupware that better support collaborative tasks in virtual teams. Much like collaboration in co-located teams, collaboration in virtual teams refers to synchronous and asynchronous interactions and tasks to achieve common goals. The use of virtual teams allows organizations to enroll key specialists, regardless of their physical location [ , ].
This allows organizations to optimize teams by using only the best talent available [ 63 , ]. In theory, virtual teams also reduce the need for travelling between sites, which should reduce costs in terms of time, money, and stress [ ].
