Editorial

Citation

Peters, J. (1999), "Editorial", Team Performance Management, Vol. 5 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/tpm.1999.13505faa.001

Editorial

Teams imply physical presence and proximity. When you think of a team, what exactly do you picture? A sales team, working together on a client presentation? A manufacturing team, gathered around some problem on an assembly line? A soccer team, being briefed by a coach in a dressing room? A management team, gathered around a boardroom table?

Chances are, you will have to change that sort of picture, for teams in the future will increasingly be "virtual teams"; combinations of people in different physical locations who have never met in person. And does that mean that the same disciplines and dynamics of physical teams will hold up? I suspect not, just like an on-line conference has very different dynamics to a physical one. Correspondence through e-mail, especially, has a sequential, step-by-step form rather than concurrent simultaneity of face-to-face interchanges, and provides the possibility of a more reflective response. E-mail also provides a permanent record ­ injudicious words are there for ever and can be reviewed and stewed over at length. This suggests at the very least that intra-team interchanges need to be handled with more care and design than would face-to-face ones.

Many other questions arise in designing and managing virtual teams. How should they be led? Will psychometric profiling, so beloved of many team designers, hold up in the virtual world? Is, indeed, there any such thing as a "virtual team" or does virtual working mean the end of teams and the rise of what some call "collaborative individualism"; more like a professional practice than a work team per se?

The challenge is to both construct coherent theory of virtual teams and report on emergent practice. We hope that we can act as a forum for both in the years ahead.

John PetersActing EditorE-mail: jpeters@mcb.co.uk