Int. J. Business Intelligence and Data Mining, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2009 195 Copyright © 2009 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Modelling the characteristics of virtual teams’ structure Daphna Shwarts-Asher*, Niv Ahituv and Dalia Etzion Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, 69978, Israel E-mail: daphna@post.tau.ac.il E-mail: ahituv@post.tau.ac.il E-mail: etziond@post.tau.ac.il *Corresponding author Abstract: The main research question is whether output of virtual teams is affected by the teams’ structure. A model, suggesting that the team structure can be manipulated in order to increase the team’s output will be presented. The study used an experiment, in which subjects, who were grouped into teams, had to share information in order to complete an intellective task. The findings indicated that virtual teams output were inferior to face-to-face teams output, and that structure did overcome two negative impact of the virtuallity – less effectiveness and less satisfaction; yet, it did not raise the virtual team efficiency. Keywords: management; e-infrastructure; e-social science; virtual teams; team structure; team performance. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Shwarts-Asher, D., Ahituv, N. and Etzion, D. (2009) ‘Modelling the characteristics of virtual teams’ structure’, Int. J. Business Intelligence and Data Mining, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp.195–212. Biographical notes: Daphna Shwarts-Asher is a PhD student at The Faculty of Management, Tel Aviv University, Israel. Her research interests are OB and economic and behavioural aspects of the internet. The objective of the PhD research is to investigate corporate output of virtual teams, assuming team structure can compensate for the shortcomings of virtuallity. She has presented the research at The 3rd International e-Social Science Conference (Michigan, USA) and at The 3rd International Conference on Complex, Intelligent and Software Intensive Systems (Fukuoka, Japan). In addition, she teaches courses in the field of management at several institutions. Niv Ahituv is the Academic Director of Netvision Institute of Internet Studies and the Marko and Lucie Chaoul Chair for Research in Information Evaluation at Tel Aviv University. From 1999 to 2002 he served as Vice President and Director General (CEO) of Tel Aviv University. From 1989 to 1994 he served as the Dean of Graduate School of Business Administration at Tel Aviv University. In 2005 he was awarded a Life Time Achievement Award by ILLA, The Israeli Association for Information Technology. He represents the Israeli Government in UNESCO in issues related to Information Technology.