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Building on the complex adaptive systems (CAS) framework, this paper aims to investigate the detrimental effect of virtual teams’ (VTs) challenges and the upholding role of trust on the members’ ratings of VTs’ performance. Also, the study examines the mediating role of the preferences for VTs and investigates the moderating function of the openness to experience personality trait on the relationship between challenges, trust and preference for VTs.

Cross-sectional survey data were collected from a sample of 498 university students in Romania and path analysis was used for data analysis.

The results show evidence of the harmful effect of VTs’ challenges on members’ ratings of VTs’ performance and reveal that trust boosts members’ ratings of VTs’ performance. The findings highlight the mediating role of members’ preference for VTs and show evidence that the openness to experience personality trait strengthens the negative effect of the challenges on members’ preference for VTs.

Given the cross-sectional design of the study, inferences regarding the causal relationship between the variables cannot be made, and further longitudinal research is called for.

The study builds on the CAS framework and addresses the call for research to explore the variables that might contribute or impede VTs’ performance.

The purpose of this paper is to reference academic publications and semi-structured interviews with management experts employing a coaching style within their teams to create a platform for evaluating specific coaching mechanisms, evolving insights to the characteristics required of a manager applying coaching to deal with team challenge. A practical perspective led by managers using critical incidents to explore and highlight areas of experience and expertise in dealing with team challenge.

This qualitative assessment was derived from 30 semi-structured interviews which were recorded, transcribed and thematically analysed to assist in added insight for work-based management of dealing with team challenge. Data from 30 interviews were collected via Skype, FaceTime or Zoom to create the necessary rapport and capture the experience of dealing with team challenge. An audio record of each interview was captured to create a synchronised, fully indexed transcript from which characteristics and mechanisms could be identified.

Findings illustrated that the characteristics of the work-based manager themselves is an essential part of the mix when dealing with team challenge, the application of a coaching style accentuated the competencies and characteristics required of the manager to successfully address team challenge, demanding a specific coaching mindset. The starting point is the manager themselves knowing all the details before they intervene by utilising the traditional competencies of a professional coach.

Only one sample of 30 interviewees contributed to this research, a wider sample would be advisable, including a wider cultural base to assess characteristics in a variety of contexts. There was a wide sector representation in this research (public, private and third sector), but specific sector analysis would also be interesting to assess validity of results more rigorously.

The practical outputs from this research of the manager’s self-assessment can be used by managers as a check list when dealing with team challenge or by HR managers as an assessment tool to decide which managers to invest in coaching training. The characteristics may be a means of deciphering the skills of the managers. Finally the self-assessment could be used as a training tool to support work-based learning or coach training on how to address team challenge and offer a discussion prompt around these elements as being essential.

Coaching dialogue is a social interaction and this research contributes to enhancing the quality and purpose of social interactions in the workplace. By employing a coaching style of listening, questioning and reflecting managers can utliise a standard framework for solving issues in the workplace.

Dealing with challenge in teams through the analysis of the coaching style applied by 30 managers is unique, the value added through this research has been an enhanced appreciation of the manager as coach role and an appreciation to the established team models of Fleishman, Katzenbach and Smith, Hackman and Edmondson. This added layer enabling managers to deal with team challenge associated with our ever changing work environment.

Over the last couple of decades, many organisations are increasingly adopting virtual team concepts, and construction companies in the Middle East are no exception. Members of a virtual team are geographically scattered and represent a diverse range of cultures. Thus, challenging issues emerge more frequently than in a traditional team. There are challenges associated with space and time as well as high client's demand. Therefore, this study aims to identify and probe the causes of the challenges in virtual project teams in the construction industry of the Middle East.

A list of challenges was derived through a comprehensive review of relevant literature. Questionnaire survey was conducted with professionals who are involved in construction virtual project teams. Further, the factor analysis technique was used to analyse the survey responses.

The results show that the challenges in virtual team arrangement in the Middle East construction industry can be grouped into seven categories, namely, organisational culture, conflict within the team, characteristics of the team members, trust within the team members diversity of the team, communication and training, and cohesion in the team. Understanding of these factors will drive the needed platform to support effective virtual project teams in the Middle East.

This study raises the prospect that organisations may establish an environment for team members to achieve higher levels of virtual cooperation by concentrating on these potentially crucial factors. This, in turn, will encourage further innovation and performance within construction organisations.

There is a generalized belief that cultural differences can have more negative consequences than benefits within the international business (IB) literature. This study argues that cultural differences are not perceived as constrains in millennial global virtual teams (GVTs). Additionally, using the theory of cooperation and competition and the motivated information processing perspective, the purpose of this paper is to uncover the process by which millennials working in GVTs address various challenges to ensure effective functioning and accomplishment of desired team outcomes.

This paper analyzes a data set of 503 project journals from the global enterprise experience, a virtual team competition. It uses qualitative content analysis tools and secondary data sources.

The authors find that for millennials, cross-cultural issues are not the predominant challenge when working in GVTs, unlike the prevailing understanding in the IB literature. This is because contrary to expectations, cross-cultural problems are often not experienced, while other team phenomena become more relevant, such as interpersonal and task-based issues. In addition, the paper describes how members of GVTs apply distinct challenge reconstruction and solution generation cognitive schemes to deal with both, expected and unexpected challenges.

This study contributes to the literature on virtual teams by identifying how millennials and post-millennials deal with the challenges embedded in the GVT interaction context by simplifying the unfamiliarity associated with the broader context rather than addressing each issue in isolation. Finally, the paper elaborates on factors that highlight the positive outcomes of multicultural teams while making cultural differences less salient in contemporary GVT contexts.

This paper aims to extend the extant knowledge on virtual teams by examining the challenges of virtual project teams in organisations in Nigeria.

Data were collected through semi-structured interviews. Totally, 20 interviews were recorded, transcribed and analysed. Validity and reliability were achieved by first assessing the plausibility in terms of already existing knowledge on some of the virtual project team issues identified by participants.

The findings from this study confirmed the growing relevance of virtual project teams in highly competitive global business environments. It emerged that some of the challenges identified in the study had some level of congruence with those previously identified from similar studies from other geographical locations. The findings also suggested that challenges in virtual project teams can be linked to the organisation, the project team and the virtual environment or even a combination of all.

The present study corroborates the position that managing virtual project teams requires additional efforts to attain their objectives through effective communications and the adoption of appropriate technology.

The originality of this study lies in its exploration of virtual project team challenges in a sub-Saharan Africa country (Nigeria). By identifying the challenges associated with virtual project teams, stakeholders will be better able to successfully establish and manage virtual project teams better.

The aim of this paper is to introduce the concept of liminality as a theoretical lens to explore and discuss how challenges, accompanied by frustrations and confusion, can enable significant learning in a teamwork setting. Student team narratives on how they handle challenges they face working to solve real-world problems are used as the basis for the discussion.

This is a case study using student narratives from an interdisciplinary master course at a Norwegian university.

We argue that the concept of liminality can support teachers and student teams to understand and handle challenges in ways that enable significant learning and innovation. Practical implications for teachers and facilitators are provided at the end of the paper.

This paper offers new lenses to understand the team- and learning processes in courses where students work with real-world problems. If the teams are able to stay open in the liminality phase it enables significant learning and innovation. This capacity is valuable in a time where teams face complexity and uncertainty is becoming more of a standard than an exception, both in higher education and in working life.

This paper delves into the complexities of daily dispersed tech team dynamics and aims to understand the underlying reasons for the challenges that such teams face. Through personal observations and analysis, this paper aims to identify communication barriers and propose actionable insights and strategies for improvement.

By leveraging personal insights and observations from the IT HR field from three different countries, information and data was collected. Such personalized approach allowed for a deeper exploration of real-world scenarios, how physically dispersed teams work and what challenges they struggle with. A comprehensive examination of the issues faced by tech teams operating globally also allowed to observe the noteworthy outcomes that could bring the best benefit for such teams.

As geographically dispersed tech teams continue to gain popularity, understanding the challenges that the teams might face and the potential ways of solving them become As HR as well as team managers roles now evolve, flexibility becomes paramount for navigating global team dynamics.

This paper is a contemporary call for action to stimulate management, enlightening them on the requisites for establishing and cultivating high-performing teams that work across geographical boundaries. There is a lack of understanding of what challenges physically dispersed teams face and to what degree those challenges impact the teams. This paper addresses this deficiency.

The purpose of this paper is to explore hybrid work spaces, combining open-plan, team-based offices with virtual work and leadership, in relation to the main leadership and team challenges virtual project environments encounter.

In a review of virtual team literature, virtuality is defined and its main challenges to project leadership are identified. Based on the literature, several semi-structured interviews with project team managers within telecom and IT-consultancy were conducted. Using an exploratory approach, the authors introduce some new leadership concepts and functional benefits of open-plan offices important for virtual project environments.

The findings suggest that project managers encounter several new kinds of challenges while leading virtual projects. Co-location of the project team during certain stages in open-plan, team-based offices may meet some of these challenges. The authors claim that spatial arrangements and their embodied subjective experiences make an impact on the effectiveness of virtual project teams.

This paper develops new conceptual thinking of how office facilities may contribute to productive virtual project teams. Further empirical studies in other settings are needed to generate generalizable findings.

The paper discusses and provides arguments for real estate and facility managers, as well as project and team leaders, for the importance of open-plan offices for virtual project teams.

The paper combines and benefits from different discussions on workspaces, virtual team and leadership. Furthermore, the paper introduces the notion of spatial leadership beyond the mainstream leader-centric approach to point out the importance of physical workspace of virtual teams and how the workspaces can perform leadership functions.

This paper aims to explore the impact of team psychological safety and team learning on the creation of team knowledge. When teams engage in learning, their interactions contribute to improved performance. Very little research evaluates whether the learning also creates new knowledge related to the task or the team itself.

The proposed model is evaluated through a mixed method research design around a team problem-solving experiment. Task- and team-related team mental models are elicited using concept mapping and questionnaires and are measured before and after the experiment. The model is evaluated in engineering teams from the USA and France.

The findings confirm the proposed model; team psychological safety and team learning positively impact team knowledge creation for both task- and team-related knowledge.

This research has theoretical, methodological and practical implications. The team psychological safety model is expanded, team learning is evaluated from the team interactions instead of members’ self-assessments and team knowledge is measured dynamically. Developing team psychological safety and creating team learning opportunities positively impacts the team’s knowledge.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how inspection team members work together to conduct surveys of hospitals, the challenges teams may face and how these might be addressed.

Data were gathered through an evaluation of a new regulatory model for acute hospitals in England, implemented by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) during 2013-2014. The authors interviewed key stakeholders, observed inspections and surveyed and interviewed inspection team members and hospital staff. Common characteristics of temporary teams provided an analytical framework.

The temporary nature of the inspection teams hindered the conduct of some inspection activities, despite the presence of organisational citizenship behaviours. In a minority of sub-teams, there were tensions between CQC employed inspectors, healthcare professionals, lay people and CQC data analysts. Membership changes were infrequent and did not appear to inhibit team functioning, with members displaying high commitment. Although there were leadership authority ambiguities, these were not problematic. Existing processes of recruitment and selection, training and preparation and to some extent leadership, did not particularly lend themselves to addressing the challenges arising from the temporary nature of the teams.

Conducting the research during the piloting of the new regulatory approach may have accentuated some challenges. There is scope for further research on inspection team leadership.

Issues may arise if inspection and accreditation agencies deploy temporary, heterogeneous survey teams.

This research is the first to illuminate the functioning of inspection survey teams by applying a temporary teams perspective.