Teamwork Issues in Virtual Teams

Over the past few decades, there has been much interest in various forms of participation in the workplace and in its impacts on learning from work for individuals and organisations. Teamwork has been the object of much attention in labour economics, in sociology of work, as well as in human resources management (Tremblay, Rolland & Davel, 2000; Davel, Gomez da Silva, Rolland & Tremblay, 2001). Collaborative work and learning have also been the object of much attention in HRM and organisational learning debates, as well as in education circles (Henri & Lundgren, 2000). Much of this interest stems from gains that organisations can expect to obtain from interaction between workers in terms of quality of products, innovation, productivity, and the like. Knowledge management has also spurred interest in recent years, partly on the basis of these expected gains from a better management of the knowledge hidden within organisations. More recently, the concept of communities of practice has been put forward as a form of knowledge management which paves the way to attainment of the various organisational objectives: productivity, quality, innovation, and so forth. In our view, this last concept is closely related to teamwork issues, and we will show how in the following pages.