Learning in virtual teams

This chapter reviews and integrates the latest research on team learning and virtual teams to understand the challenges associated with how team members learn and improve performance when working across distance. Team learning is defined as changes in a team's knowledge and performance as a function of members gaining experiences of working with one another. This chapter presents an integrative framework that links challenges in virtual teams (lack of informal, spontaneous communication, lack of social presence, lack of common ground, reduced team cohesion and identification, lack of trust, lack of shared knowledge and understanding) to four key team learning processes (knowledge acquisition, sharing, storage, and retrieval). Three remedies are proposed to overcome the challenges through a strong shared identity, the choice of effective collaboration technologies, and timely teamwork interventions.