Virtual Teams: Projects, Protocols and Processes

Rating:
Summary: One of the best books on virtual teaming
Review: David Pauleen has pulled together an excellent book here. It has a practitioner / user orientation, backed-up by scholarly research, but not an indigestible amount of the latter. There's real data here too - many chapters report empirical study of virtual teams from surveys, interviews etc. It's positioned exactly right for a reader who wants an authoritative account of major issues in virtual teaming and summaries of best practices, plus helpful reviews of the literature, but without overdosing on academic theorising.

What particularly makes this book refreshing is that authors aren't shy of challenging assumptions and orthodoxies, especially about trust and leadership. Although every chapter makes its contribution, two particularly stand out.

I really enjoyed the chapter by Walter Fernandez who reports trust (and mistrust) development in a large virtual team project. Great common sense here mixed with business insight (usually so missing), a healthy dose of cynicism, and empirical data.

Also remarkable is the final chapter by Peter Murphy. He uses a metaphor of 'the organization as city' to put virtual teaming in the context of physical centres of trade and knowledge. This chapter is brimful of ideas which challenge those of the earlier chapters, and Pauleen has cleverly used it as a coda to this valuable book.

Dr A J Gundry
Director, Knowledge Ability Ltd
Malmesbury UK