Distributed Team Collaboration in Organizations: Emerging Tools and Practices

This book will outline the drivers causing this transformation in project work, introduce a variety of models that represent distributed team configurations, summarize some of the challenges inherent in leading and contributing to distributed teams through a set of case studies, and suggest practices that are emerging to optimize distributed team performance. The goal of this book is to provide a digestible synopsis of the phenomena of distributed / virtual teams in a way that organizational leaders can leverage the unique characteristics of these teams to their advantage. The potential impact is to shift thinking from a reactive stance (i.e. coping with the challenges of virtual teams) to a proactive stance of exploiting the potential of distributed teams for their unique ability to be deployed in alignment with organizational strategy. An additional goal of this book is to raise awareness of the new skills needed for leadership, collaboration, and cooperation in these teams and to aid organizations and universities in developing these skills in the workforce. This book has the potential to introduce new models for team design in the distributed environment. For the technology industry, this book also has the potential to provide use cases in effective distributed teams and emerging practices that can aid in the design of new collaborative tools.

Geared specifically for organizational leaders who are working with distributed teams, but also applicable to educators with distributed or virtual group work, this book presents 17 chapters authored by 23 international academic and industry practitioners. Addressing changes in project work, and providing models of team configurations and discussion of challenges as evidence in case studies and suggestions of emerging practices' impact on virtual or distributed teams, this work will help the advanced person to explore in more depth the effective use and implementation of virtual or distributed group work. Separated into four sections, the editor provides chapters on the setting, theory and research, emerging tools and practices, and preparing the workforce of tomorrow. Each chapter contains key terms and definitions, along with references and suggested readings, and where applicable uses visuals to illustrate concepts. The volume itself includes a compilation of references, a traditional table of contents, and an annotated table of contents along with an index for ease of locating desired materials.