What is a virtual team?

Virtual team is a team whose members are scattered in different places, but they work together through remote communication technology.

The members of the virtual team are scattered in distant places, which can be in different cities or even across continents. People can span different organizations. Working hours can be staggered. Contact depends on modern communication technology. They accomplish the same goals and tasks. The rapid development of modern information and communication technology has broken through the time and space limitation of cooperation, and virtual teams have emerged under such a background.

Extended data:

Compared with traditional organizational forms, virtual teams have obvious advantages:

(A) Talent advantage

The use of modern communication and information technology has greatly shortened the distance around the world, and location is no longer a direct factor affecting people's work and living places, which has greatly broadened the source channels of talents for organizations. Organizations can dynamically gather and utilize human resources on a global scale, which creates conditions for obtaining talents with specialized skills that are usually difficult to recruit, and also reduces the brain drain of key talents.

(B) Information superiority

Virtual team members come from a wide range of fields and can fully obtain technology, knowledge and product information resources from all over the world, which lays the foundation for maintaining the advanced nature of products. At the same time, members can collect the corresponding information of customers all over the world, reflect customers' needs and solve customers' related problems in time, so as to fully understand customers and help organizations design and develop products and services that meet customers' needs as soon as possible.

(3) Competitive advantage

Virtual teams gather outstanding talents from all over the world, and they all have knowledge structure advantages in their respective fields. The combination of many individual advantages will inevitably form a strong competitive advantage.

At the same time, through the sharing of knowledge, information and technical means, the good experience and inspiration of outstanding members can be quickly popularized in the digital management network, and complementary advantages and effective cooperation can be realized. Good tools and mechanisms for knowledge collection, screening, sorting and analysis in the network enable scattered knowledge from many different channels to be quickly integrated into systematic collective wisdom and transformed into competitive advantage.

(D) Efficiency advantage

Team is one of the effective means for an efficient organization to cope with environmental changes, and virtual teams use the latest technologies such as network, mail, mobile phone and video teleconference to achieve basic communication, which is more attractive. Team members can exchange information in time to avoid information retention, thus shortening the time spent on information communication and ensuring that relatively correct decisions can be made in time.

(E) Cost advantage

Virtual teams break the boundaries of organizations, enabling organizations to make full use of external human resources and reduce the pressure of internal labor costs. On this basis, the organization can greatly simplify the organization and redesign the organizational structure, so as to make the personnel flow in a direction conducive to the development of the organization and promote the flattening of the organizational structure.

Baidu Encyclopedia-Virtual Team