The Handbook of High Performance Virtual Teams: A Toolkit for Collaborating Across Boundaries

Chapter 10. Team Composition and Member Selection: Optimizing Teams for Virtual Collaboration

Kara L. Orvis, Stephen J.Zaccaro

Teams are important in almost every organization and have been of particular interest to organizational psychologists over the past few decades. The use of teams allows consideration of expertise in multiple areas (Rouse, Cannon-Bowers, & Salas, 1992) as team members are often brought together with diverse knowledge, skills, and abilities. The greater wealth of information found in teams in comparison to any one individual member has prompted a plethora of research dedicated to understanding teams (see Kozlowski & Ilgen, 2006, for a review). Traditionally the study of teams has focused on teams whose members are located ...