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

Part V. Working on a Collaborative Team

The variety of methods for strengthening team performance and the importance of this topic are reflected in the fact that more chapters in this handbook address this subject than any other. Chapter Fourteen suggests a number of ways to ensure that the technology actually does support the team's functioning. Selecting the most appropriate technology for the team is a matching process that depends on how the members' social presence is promoted or inhibited by the technology and by the media richness the tools provide. As technology improves, a new challenge emerges: how to filter out excess information or set boundaries around available time, so members are not overwhelmed. Team effectiveness depends on decisions ...