Abstract
Virtuality in organizations has usually been treated as a characteristic that is observed either at a team or organizational level. However, the penetration of new technologies into our lives has transformed the entire design of organizations and teams. Not only has the design of teams and organizations changed, but the context and design of our jobs have also been impacted. Today, even employees in traditional team settings use electronic communication tools to work with multiple dispersed contacts outside of their teams and organizations, such as colleagues, clients or suppliers, who do not share the same geographical location. With all of these changes, virtuality can no longer be considered as a concept that is exclusive to virtual team members. In today’s organizations, to some extent, everyone’s tasks involve non-face-to-face contacts, irrespective of team virtuality. It therefore becomes crucial to identify the task virtuality phenomenon in organizations. With this paper, the example of Yahoo! is used as a case study to illustrate how task virtuality can be relevant for the design of organizations. Additionally, the proposed two-dimensional framework integrates both team virtuality and task virtuality elements in organizations. This framework is novel in that it not only allows us how to conceptualize the task virtuality, but also provides practical guidance for managers to identify and understand the factors leading to high task virtuality and to deal with the resulting complexities.
Highlights
Communication with non-face-to-face contacts has been increasingly sophisticating our lives more than anything else
Unlike previous studies investigating the individual level of virtuality, we extended the concept based on the discussion that co-located workers could possess high individual task virtuality, if they are highly dependent on collaboration, cooperation and interaction with non-face-to-face contacts
The aim of the paper is to extend our conceptual understanding of individual level virtuality, the concept coined by Suh and colleagues [19]
Summary
Communication with non-face-to-face contacts has been increasingly sophisticating our lives more than anything else. Hackman and Stepina [1] define “dealing with others” as one of the core dimensions in their job characteristics model It is described as “The degree to which the job requires the employee to work closely with other people in carrying out the work activities (including dealings with other organization members and with external organizational ‘clients.’)” [1] Organizations, teams and, jobs are becoming more virtual as we increasingly communicate and perform tasks with non-face-to-face contacts. Individuals, who have limited physical connection with their networks in knowledge extensive settings, know less about their networks and the expertise of the network [9] This situation discourages employees from collaborating and communicating with others that are not physically contacted. “out of sight, out of mind” could be perceived as a major challenge for many employees
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