Aim: Gain insight into how a relationship occur between trust in a virtual team’s e-leader and the satisfaction of the individual virtual team members. Method: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten virtual team members and one e- leader. By the means of grounded theory data from the interviews were analysed. Findings and results are further presented and discussed as distinct themes found in the empirical data. Result & Conclusions: We searched for a relationship between trust in the e-leader and the individual virtual team members’ satisfaction. Our findings show that the individual team members’ trust in the e-leader is influencing the feeling of satisfaction in their working environment. The three cues identified to build trust which in turn yields satisfaction in an organisational setting, first relationship and communication, second team spirit, third individual focus. Suggestions for future research: We suggest a longitudinal approach for further research to understand the long term effects and benefits for the organisation from the relationship between trust and satisfaction. We also believe the result can benefit from studies conducted in other businesses where the competitive landscape and, or setup may differ. Contribution of the thesis: The thesis contributes to an understanding of what trust in the e-leader contributes to in a virtual team in regards to its individual team members and their satisfaction.

The importance of knowledge management has been on the spotlight for many years. Many researches related to the knowledge management are focused on the issues of knowledge sharing and knowledge creation, but only few are directly linked to the knowledge integration process. In this thesis, we will exam the AnTec operation to discover the benefits and incentives of knowledge integration process to it's software development. This study will also explore how the company can establish goal, make decision, confirm the knowledge requirements,and obtain knowledge externally and internally by utilizing the knowledge integration process. Performance of the software development can be dramatically improved from the knowledge integration elements of "direction", "sequencing", "routines", and "group problem soling and decision making" in a virtual team. The finding of the study has suggested: (1) The knowledge integration process requires efficient communication among system analyses, department managers, and the end users. IT manager should be responsible for the quality of all questions proposed. (2) Fully utilize the knowledge integration structure and properly extract know-hows from different areas to proceed the software development in the virtual team are essential to the success of the knowledge integration process. (3) This study will be govern into two models - "Knowledge Sharing Process and Structure" and "Virtual Team Operation" models and can be reviewed by AnTec for further reference. Keywords : Virtual Team, Knowledge Integration, Project Management

The use of Virtual Teams has become substantially more common place as the “global economy” has grown. Technology has enabled teams to collaborate across time and space, but can these teams perform as well or better than their co-located peers? The answer to this question is critical for companies considering offshoring or near shoring specific job functions. This question is also important for companies that require specialized resources that are unavailable in the local market place. The cost of relocating and centralizing specialized resources can be high and can be altogether avoided if virtual team performance is high. This paper addresses the performance question, discusses contingency factors impacting performance, and provides recommendations based both on the research and real world experience of the author / text

This thesis contemplates virtual teams, in particular the role of a leader in them. In the theoretical part of the thesis I explore and describe specific characteristics of virtual teams that distinguish them from the traditional teamwork paradigm, benefits and risks stemming from their use in the business world and policies and principles of leadership of different types of virtual teams that help achieve their maximum efficiency. In the practical portion of the thesis I demonstrate the negative effects of neglecting those principles by studying an example of a real, failed virtual team.

Virtual teams often fail to achieve their objectives because virtual team leaders lack strategies for nurturing trust among dispersed team members. The purpose of this single case study was to explore strategies virtual team leaders in large corporate banks use to build trust among virtual team members. The population of this study included 6 virtual team leaders from a large corporate bank located in the northeast region of the United States. The interpersonal trust theory was the conceptual framework of this study. Data were collected via semistructured telephone interviews and review of company documents. The data analysis process included content analysis and thematic analysis for theme identification. Data analysis revealed four themes related to strategies that leaders of virtual teams can use to build trust among team members: reliable technology, effective communication, teamwork and participation, and respect for people and culture. A fifth theme emerged related to barriers to trust strategies. The implications for positive social change include the potential to improve work environments for virtual team members isolated because of the absence of a social context.

The objective of this thesis is to investigate factors related to virtual team¡¦s collaborative performance from the view point of roles played by team leader. By observing the content of eight learning-task oriented virtual teams¡¦ Web-BBS, we try to find the difference of role model played by team leaders with high and low performance in each stage of group development adopted from Wheelan¡¦s integrated model of group development. From the model of leadership roles, a team leader will play several roles at the same time in the process of a team project, such as innovator, broker, producer, director, coordinator, monitor, facilitator, and mentor. This role model is applied to observe team leaders¡¦ behavior and construct the categories of content analysis. According to the research results, the critical role played by team leader at the initial stage is director which makes members¡¦ role and job in the team clearer. During the middle stage, the role of producer is helpful for team to keep stable growing toward high performance. In the final stage, the leader should actively participate in the team mission, and play the monitor role in order to reach superior quality of the team project. The findings of this thesis will provide some suggestions about leader¡¦s behavior in a virtual team, facilitate team development, and improve virtual team¡¦s collaborative performance.

Under the impact of the trend of globalization, enterprises face a more complicated and competitive external business environment than before. For the reason, the organization has to find out a business model which can react to any change in the environment and the market and which can reduce cost and establish a humungous niche. In such a background, an advanced information technology and an Internet communication application conjoin with the organizational demand; therefore, Virtual Team, a new type of teamwork system, is brought forth. Whether a team is virtual or traditional, it doubtlessly consists of people; however, without mutual-cooperation, the group cannot work efficiently and is arduous to accomplish a target. Apparently, there are various factors influencing the efficiency of a team. Among them, the most critical factors are leadership and team process. This study is to discuss what types of leadership should adopt to make their members cohere and then to be a competent company. The questionnaire of Virtual Team was sampled from the groups related to Information. Firstly, the author referred to the related documents to find out the factors connected to leadership versus a team, and then interviewed six managers experienced at Virtual Team to distinguish the relationships from factors. The author, furthermore, built a research framework and analyzed it in Partial Least Square. The result demonstrates that an increase on the members¡¦ participation and humanistic leadership make positive impacts on the team process of Virtual Team including communication & interaction, cooperation and conflict reconciliation. The team process, moreover, is the critical factor to affecting team efficiency.

When a face-to-face work group tries to accomplish its collective goals, the effectiveness and maturity of a group hinge on the combination of the functional roles performed by group members¡X task-oriented roles and group maintenance roles [Klopf, 1981; Benne et. al., 1948]. This research examines the phenomenon of group developmental processes, the functional roles performed by group members, and the relationships among certain critical functional roles, group maturity, and team effectiveness in the learning-task oriented virtual team setting. The samples are 24 project teams composed by part-time graduate students in a cyber university. After analyzing the group discussion sections by content analysis method, the development processes of these virtual teams demonstrate Tuckman¡¦s five-stage model of group development: forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. For the groups on forming stage, there are only two group maintenance roles ¡X initiator and information seeker/giver, performing by virtual team members. Conflicts between team members are not obvious due to virtual teams¡¦ learning-oriented task. Three group maintenance roles ¡X encourager, gatekeeper, and follower will encourage the occurrence of group cohesiveness and lead virtual teams to norming stage. Furthermore, when groups mature, four emerging task-oriented roles ¡X opinion seeker/giver, coordinator, orienter and evaluator will enhance the virtual team effectiveness. Negative functional roles (process-hindering roles) are rare due to virtual team¡¦s learning-oriented task. Therefore, this result indicates that members in a virtual team should play different critical positive functional roles according to their group¡¦s developmental stages, and it will facilitate group evolvement and improve team effectiveness.

Facing the unceasing challenges of new technology, the use of virtual teams as the future organization structure has become more and more common. The objectives of this thesis are to investigate members¡¦ behavior in each stage of group development adopted from Tuckman¡¦s five-stages model, and to find out the impact of critical behaviors on virtual team¡¦s collaborative performance. This thesis selects nine learning-task oriented virtual teams composed by part-time graduate students in cyber university of NSYSU and probes into the theme of each groups¡¦ discussions by content analysis approach. SYMLOG is applied to observe group member¡¦s behavior and construct the categories of content analysis. According to the research results, the critical behaviors of initial stage are active (U) and friendly (P) behaviors. During the middle stage, the existence of encouragers and followers should improve group development towards high performance. In the final stage, group members shall be able to shift the communication focus from emotionally expressive (B) to instrumentally controlled (F) in order to reach superior effectiveness. Therefore, the findings of this thesis will provide some suggestions about member¡¦s behavior, facilitate group development, and improve virtual team¡¦s collaborative performance.

Social network analysis is used to find all relationships from the group, dig out the prominent patterns, and observe how information flows between dyads. By social network analysis approaches, users can know how information flows through network ties, how people acquire information and resources, and how cleavages and coalitions operate. In this research, we develop a useful social network analysis system to facilitate teams¡¦ collaboration. The system can draw a social network in ego-centered or whole network layout, and provide information of social network attributes of all users. Both team leaders and general members can make use of it to understand relations and interaction patterns of their team. We also generalize social network attributes to analyze task-based teams at different team development stages for discovering the interaction patterns of different groups in groups¡¦ life cycles. Interaction patterns of members in the team and roles that users play have high influence on a virtual team¡¦s development. With these discoveries, team leaders can obtain concise information about their teams¡¦ performance, and community managers can capture stereotypes of virtual teams in the community. From these evaluation results, we confirm that social network analysis is a useful means to analyze the knowledge activities conducted by virtual teams.