J. of Psy. Res. Vol. 3 No. 2 (2008) p. 251-264 Corresponding author Email : mpganesh@iitb.ac.in, meena@iitb.ac.in © MD Publications Pvt Ltd Nurturing Team Performance by Managing Virtualness M. P. Ganesh and Meenakshi Gupta ABSTRACT Recent advancements in information and communication technologies have changed the way teams work by diminishing physical and temporal boundaries and have led to the birth of virtual teams. As the affordability of technological innovations increased, more and more work teams started opting for those technologies at various levels to manage their functions and communicate among themselves. Thus, it becomes very difficult to classify a team into a pure face-to-face or virtual team. Therefore management scholars have started seeing virtualness as a characteristic of every work team. In this context, based on an extensive review of research literature, the present article tries to understand the effect of virtualness on team performance and the factors which influence performance in virtual teams. We have also developed a model explaining the dynamics of the relationship between virtualness and team performance. We conclude by delineating ways to manage virtualness to improve performance in work teams. Key Words: Virtualness, Virtual teams, Team dynamics. INTRODUCTION Recent advancements in information and communication technologies have changed the way teams work by diminishing physical and temporal boundaries and have led to the birth of virtual teams (VTs). Generally virtual teams are defined as teams in which members are geographically dispersed and interact using technology-mediated communication to achieve their goals. Using virtual teams has many advantages both for the organization and for the employee. For the organization, a virtual team helps to acquire the best expertise in spite of the geographical location of the employee. It also helps to reduce costs and time incurred due to employee travel. Virtual teams help to nurture inter- and intra-organizational collaboration and are very useful in cross-functional projects and project outsourcing. They are also useful in a wide range of business activities like project management, decision making, and strategic planning. Virtual teams offer important competitive advantages, including availability of world-wide expertise, ability to engage in parallel project development with customers and suppliers, real time marketing capability and better research capacity through shared databases and Internet. Organizations which use virtual