Abstract

Editor's Desk Celia Romm Livermore, Wayne State University, Detroit, USA ak1667@wayne.edu Virtual teams have been defined by Townsend, DeMarie and Hendrickson (1998, p. 18) as "geographically and/or organizationally dispersed co-workers that are assembled using a combination of telecommunications and information technologies to accomplish an organizational task". Following this definition, "virtual work" can be defined as the work that virtual teams produce. As indicated by Saunders (2000), the above definition of virtual teams encompasses a range of different types of work arrangements, including teams whose members seldom meet face-to-face yet are able to work together, and teams who meet regularly face-to-face, but conduct their work in between meetings virtually. In all these arrangements, virtual work is often global work. It is also in many cases cross-national and cross-cultural and is associated with innovative and possibly controversial practices, such as outsourcing. Saunders (2000) raised the interesting point that as outsourcing continues to become more popular, virtual teams may have one or more members who are temporary employees of the organization. This creates a situation where membership in virtual teams might in some situations be fluid, with members moving in and out of the team throughout the duration of the work project