Virtual teams in organizations

Organizations continue to widely adopt virtual teams as a primary way to structure work and the recent growth in utilization has outstripped theory and research on virtual teams. The explosive growth in virtual team use by organizations and the inherent challenges of virtual teams highlight the need for theory and research to inform organizations in designing, structuring and managing virtual teams. Therefore, the purpose of this special issue is to (a) advance theory and research on virtual teams, (b) offer new directions for research on the topic, and (c) contribute to efforts to enhance the effectiveness of virtual teams in organizations. Toward this end, in this introduction we provide a brief overview of virtual teams and present an input-process-output framework to contextualize and organize the eight papers appearing in this special issue.