The implementation of virtual teams is briskly increasing, particularly among transnational organizations that find global virtual teams a natural way to address their needs for global reach. While proximal and virtual teams share many attributes, including similar performance measures, they differ in characteristics in the nature of the work. This quasi-experimental field study examined virtual team subcultures relative to structure, relationships, and primacy, and the moderation from team boundary permeability on project schedule variance and the number of errors created by the team in a transnational organization. Consequently, recommendations are made for formalization and thinning team boundaries.
Transnational organizations are proliferating as globalization continues (Daft, 1998), particularly among organizations involved in knowledge work (ITAA, 2003). Among the primary difficulties encountered in this design are the coordination and management of work that must transcend geographies and time zones (Hertel, Konradt, & Orlikowski, 2004). A means by which such activity is conducted is to use virtual teams, where members who are geographically dispersed use technology media to communicate and coordinate their teamwork (Bell & Kozlowski, 2002;Hertel et al., 2004). Most virtual teams have degrees of "virtualness" (Bell & Kozlowski, 2002), and many use a hybrid model, with mixtures of remote and proximal work (Hertel et al., 2004). Transnational virtual teams, by virtue of their global dispersion, tend to rely exclusively, or almost so, on technologicalmediated interaction and represent the most extreme form of virtual work (Hyde, 2004).
Virtual teams are emerging in India and Asia and are becoming commonplace in the United Kingdom, Western Europe, and the United States (Daniels,