Advantages and Disadvantages of Virtual Teams in Organizations

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Virtual teams are becoming prominent in contemporary organisations worldwide for
saving both time and money. After conducting secondary research, this essay has been
completed to find out advantages and disadvantages of virtual teams in organisations to
comprehend whether investment made in virtual teams provide companies with competitive
edge or prove challenging for the existing employees. This essay will examine and present
advantages along with drawbacks behind implementing virtual teams and then present few
recommendations in the end.
Virtual teams can be defined as multicultural groups comprising individuals that are
dispersed worldwide, relying on communicational technologies and information to work for a
specific goal. Virtual teams facilitate increased participation between team members as the
communication networks allows every member contribute on the basis of their individual
talent. Virtual teams not only provide with long term benefits like increased use of employee-
time and opportunity for leveraging expertise and knowledge around the globe but also
provides organisations with round the clock employees availability. However, the two most
advantageous factors gained by enabling virtual teams are building trust among each other
and developing mutual understanding between people belonging to diversified places and
societies that certainly provides equal opportunity to every employee even if they remain
disabled ( Morley, et al., 2015). Second important advantage recognised is promoting work
originality and creativity by increased employee participation (Simpson, 2017).
Talent, according to Bhat, Pande & Ahuja (2017) is a “fragile term” within teams and
must be dealt very carefully especially when teams are allocated in diverse places. Virtual
teams are mostly appreciated in literature as every member of virtual teams understand that
they require interacting for limited time period and can easily change their attitude for