Abstract:

Competition is forcing businesses to be increasingly flexible (Cervantes, 2005) and to opt for knowledge-based production models (Townsend, DeMarie and Hendrickson, 1998). Most organisations use some type of work team in order to optimise their human resources and make their processes more efficient. Particularly significant in these teams is the figure of the leader. However, more and more organisations are introducing virtual work teams, whose members are geographically scattered, electronically interacting with each other, with various duties and with the ability to work in different time zones (Jarvenpaa and Leidner, 1999). These virtual teams provide the company with great flexibility, fostering the creation of knowledge and skills (Greenberg, Greenberg and Antonucci, 2007).

There has been a constant growth in the number of virtual teams since the nineteen-nineties; in the USA alone, it has been estimated that some 9.2 million employees were working from home in 1997, with a marked increase to 13.4 million in 2010. Recent figures show that 40 per cent of the USA's biggest companies, or those on the Fortune 500 list, have at least 40 per cent of their employees involved in virtual teams (Bullock and Tucker Klein, 2011), a trend that these companies aim to consolidate in 61 per cent of the cases.