Abstract
Virtual teams has become more and more common in today’s world, where globalization means that people from different locations all over the world suddenly work together in teams. Teams that needs to cooperate on a daily basis without the advantages of collocated teams. Can Virtual teams work as effective as collocated teams? The thesis is based on the authors experience from Nammo, where I have been working for 19 years. To find out more about the experience with virtual teams at Nammo, a survey was sent out to a selected group at Nammo, working in different locations all over the world, from the US, Europe and Australia.
The findings revealed that teamwork in virtual teams doesn’t work nearly as good as for the collocated teams at Nammo. Several issues were identified, like communication issues, leadership and trust issues. These findings matches the issues that the literature identifies as the main problems with virtual teams. The survey also revealed that similar issues was evident even in collocated teams.
The conclusion for the thesis is that there is possibilities for a virtual team to be able to work as effective as collocated teams, as long as there is a focus on the main issues from the start, or even before the team is put together, to reduce or remove the different effects that the teams have from being a virtual team.