The Evolution of the Virtuality Phenomenon in Organizations: A Critical Literature Review
The Evolution of the Virtuality Phenomenon in Organizations: A Critical Literature Review

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this study is to present a review of the scholarly literature on virtual teams and to redefine the key characteristics and features of team virtuality and virtual teams. A literature review through content analyses was conducted using the Web of Science, ABI/Inform and EBSCO databases in order to comprehensively explore all definitions and characteristics of the concepts of virtual team and team virtuality. A total of 265 articles published between 2006 and 2013 were analyzed, and the details of the content analyses are herein presented. The analyses reveal that the characteristics and definitions are often contradictory and rarely correspond, thereby attesting to a gap in the literature. With this study, we present a portrait that exposes the literatures one-sided focus on a virtual team’s geographic dispersion and its dependency on electronic communication as the core sources of virtuality. This study aims to unify the definitions and ultimately propose a new definition that helps to measure virtuality more comprehensively by addressing the gap observed in past research. This paper contributes to the literature incorporating the studies from the most extensive fields of research.

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