What are the factors that affect a Virtual (distributed) team?

At the core of any virtual team process is communication. If technology is the foundation of the virtual business relationship, communication is the cement. The virtual environment presents considerable challenges to effective communication including time delays in sending feedback, lack of a common frame of reference for all members, differences in salience and interpretation of written text, and assurance of participation from remote team members . Moreover, nonverbal communication, an important component of team communication, is usually missing in virtual teams.

Thus, teams operating in the virtual environment face greater obstacles to orderly and efficient information exchange than their counterparts in the traditional context, a difficulty that is compounded when the virtual team is global in nature.

Besides communication effectiveness that may be owing to lacunae in technology, other bottlenecks due to inadequate communication planning, a global virtual environment can suffer because of differences in work culture and local work environment, inefficient program management, inefficient process synchronization, ineffective or non- deployment of feed-forward and feedback controls and lack of co-ordination with different project management teams.