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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.

The paper uses the dramaturgical perspective for conceptualising trust development within temporary virtual teams. The underlying assumption is that temporary teams do not have the luxury of time that, according to the traditional trust theories, enables familiarity among team members and promotes trust development. Yet, in these teams, trust needs to develop quickly and it is important that it lasts throughout the short duration of the project lifecycle. Using the metaphor of a theatre, a dramaturgical perspective on trust relationships is adopted and is used to present actors, co‐actors and audience as all playing a key role in scripting, staging and performing virtual plays. The dramaturgical perspective provides an illustrative approach for uncovering the interactions between key players. As it is argued, these interactions elicit the process of trust development within the temporary setting of virtual teams, constituting a type of trust relationship that is mutually negotiated and jointly constructed. This type of trust is called “situated” and emerges from the scripted, pre‐scripted, co‐scripted, re‐scripted and unscripted computer‐mediated interactions of virtual players. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.

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 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.

Virtual project teams are teams whose members use technology to varying degrees in working across locational, temporal, and relational boundaries to accomplish an interdependent task. Work in virtual project teams is a challenge for many organizations. Having studied the issue for several years, the authors propose in this paper to delve deeper into the question from the point of view of organizational support. More specifically, this paper seeks to focus on the organizational support systems and mechanisms provided by firms to their virtual project teams and their impacts on the components of these teams. The objective is to identify the structural factors and processes related to virtual teams that are affected by organizational support systems and mechanisms.

The paper reports exploratory empirical case studies of two Canadian‐based international high‐tech companies. In‐depth interviews were conducted with managers with experience in virtual project team management.

The same organizational support systems and mechanisms were found to exist in both companies. Functional processes were found to be the virtual team components that were most affected by the implementation of support systems and mechanisms. They are followed by communicational processes, which were substantially supported by various support systems and mechanisms in Company A but less supported in Company B. To a lesser extent, the relational processes of both firms were also affected, while structural factors affecting virtual project teams were almost entirely unsupported.

Virtual project teams require various kinds of commitments by corporate management. For example, we find that top management supports virtual project teams by means of human resources (HR), resource allocation, coordination, and communication support systems. These support systems facilitate project coordination and monitoring, information exchange and access, trust building and cohesion between team members. These findings enable practitioners to better understand the effects of organizational support on the components of virtual teams, so that greater attention is paid to the configuration of these components and support systems can be better designed to improve virtual project team performance.

Organizational support is considered to have a strong impact on project success. Few publications have examined organizational support for virtual project teams, and even fewer have focused on its effects on such teams. This paper should contribute to fostering a better understanding of the effects of organizational support on the components of virtual project teams.

The purpose of this article is to provide guidelines to help leaders understand and lead virtual teams.

This paper discusses the importance and implementation of effective leadership for virtual teams. It begins with a review of conventional versus virtual teams, and then describes the two primary leadership functions in virtual teams – performance management and team development. Following the discussion of the development and function of new teams, the article then provides a detailed guide for the leadership of virtual teams over the life of a project. These guidelines follow the four stages of a project timeline: Pre‐Project, Project Initiation, Midstream, and Wrap‐Up.

Following guidelines and understanding the differences between conventional and virtual leadership will enable managers to become effective virtual team leaders.

The paper shows how, in the context of increasing globalization and technology, leaders can manage the challenges of leading virtual teams.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the growing body of research into virtual teams by using empirical data to validate existing theory. It analyses a project in the travel and tourism industry to determine the key elements that contributed to a successful outcome.

An ethnographic approach is used in this case of a multi‐national, multi‐organisational virtual project tasked with market validation of an ontology management system. Participant observation is supported by a range of primary and secondary data.

The importance of key factors changes over the time of the project. The early emphasis on constructs relating to technology and purpose moves towards those related to people as the project matured. The caretaker/gatekeeper role of the project leader made a significant contribution to overcoming problems of complexity. A lack of commitment to a range of information technologies heightened the reliance on periodic face‐to‐face meetings to support team interactions.

Cultural diversity is common in the travel sector and related issues may play a more significant role in other industries. Further research is needed to fully assess the impact of context on virtual team outcomes.

Recommendations for practitioners include the need to establish a framework of rules and identify training needs. A socialising period, virtual or face‐to‐face, is an essential requirement for successful virtual teamwork.

A conceptual framework, drawn from previous studies, adds clarity to the importance and relevance of the constructs of people, purpose and technology in virtual teamwork.

The purpose of this article is to share with readers details of this consortium's multicultural virtual teaming project implementation and the lessons learned from experiences of the participating students and professors.

To establish a preliminary relationship, virtual student teams exchange e‐mail messages with team mates at participating universities that provide introductions for each member of the team. Each team member uses these individual introductions to write a brief paper that introduces all team mates. Next, the students virtually interview one another to obtain answers to culture‐specific questions for each culture that is represented on the team. In some courses, this information is analysed using Hofstede's four dimensions of culture: power distance, individualism versus collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity versus femininity.

Based on participants' experiences in these virtual teaming projects, the following recommendations are presented: emphasise relationship building; solicit widespread input for planning; and balance individual control with shared objectives.

These cultural virtual teaming projects proved to be valuable learning experiences for both the students and faculty who were involved.

Performance in virtual teams, which faces cultural and demographic differences, is a relevant phenomenon that has been widely investigated in recent decades, but with opportunities in exploring other levels of analysis as individual and project. This current research aims to understand how multicultural virtual teams affect individual, team and project performance.

The authors conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) and bibliometric analysis to capture 273 papers from the Web of Science (WoS) database using a snowball approach. In a second approach, the authors selected 130 papers to conduct a content analysis.

The authors presented a longitudinal overview regarding the adoption of virtual teams in project management (PM) literature. A conceptual framework was proposed to explore the relationship between multicultural virtual teams and performance with three levels of analysis: individual, teams and project. The authors contributed with research hypotheses to be explored in future empirical studies not only at the team perspective but also at the project and individual levels. The thematic analysis suggested that the literature focus has shifted from hard to soft aspects faced by virtual teams. Social identity/categorization theory was the most prominent theory in this body, but it is not fully explored in PM literature. Other opportunities of future studies are to understand the impact of cultural diversity, the sense of belongingness, the project life cycle and the development of a knowledge management program.

The authors developed a 3-level conceptual framework for future empirical studies and demonstrated that cultural differences are mainly approached at the national level in the literature, bringing suggestions for future empirical research.

The purpose of this study is to explore some quantitative indicators from the social network analysis, observe the variations of these indicators over time and determine whether these indicators fit into the traditional team development stages model or theory. The primary focus is on the perspective of social interaction rather than the suitability of the indicator, i.e. the authors will not determine the optimal indicators nor compare the performance of different indicators. This study aims to propose a quantitative method to identify the development stages of virtual teams.

Two phases were designed in this study. The first phase was a simple study to prove the preliminary ideas and explore which quantitative indicators would be suitable for analysis. In total, 16 undergraduates were randomly assigned to two virtual teams. They were required to complete an information system (IS) project through virtual teamwork and use information and communications technologies (ICTs) to communicate with each other. After proving the preliminary ideas, the authors collected communication data of the 30 virtual teams working on IS projects in the second phase. The total duration of this process was two months.

The findings practically identified three stages, which were found to be consistent with that of the previous qualitative studies. In the initial (inclusion) stage, intensity had an upward trend. In the second (control) stage, centralization had an upward trend. In the final (affection) stage, intensity and density had upward trends and centralization had a downward trend. Both density and centralization also became smooth in this final stage. The conclusion can serve as a basis for further studies in virtual team development.

A successful virtual team will help industries to reduce their costs and increase performance and benefits. The findings will help industries quickly and objectively identify which stage they are at. This quantified approach will provide managers and leaders with a simple, useful way to highlight the needs for managing different aspects of team behavior at each stage of development. After establishing this approach, managers and leaders will be able to make plans to improve existing processes, set priorities, provide suitable principles and guidelines, etc., and eventually improve virtual team performance.