Over the last few years, I have been talking to people about their observations and insights on working in distributed structures and virtual team working. It is apparent there is a wide variety of experiences — ranging from “very challenging” at one extreme to “best thing ever” at the other, with every shade of grey in between.
This lack of consistency is already reflected in current team research, and it creates a practical problem for anyone who leads or works in a virtual team and wants to learn how to improve performance: what should you believe when faced with so many conflicting reports and streams of advice?
Part of the answer, I want to argue, lies not in the technology, the meeting cadence, or even the quality of leadership — although each of these matters. It lies in something more structural, and something that is too rarely discussed outside of academic circles: the degree and type of interdependence that binds your team together. And layered on top of that is the personality composition of the people doing the work. Get these two things right, and almost every other element of virtual team performance becomes significantly more manageable. Get them wrong, and no amount of well-intentioned culture initiatives or team-building exercises will rescue the situation.
A Team By Definition
This problem is not, in fact, novel. It has dogged team researchers for close to a hundred years, and at its root is a problem of definition. The term team is so widely used that it has become almost meaningless in many organisations. We use it interchangeably to describe a ‘real team’ in the strict sense, a loosely connected working group, and sometimes little more than an abstract collection of individuals who share a reporting line but have minimal operational interdependence.
This definitional looseness matters more in a virtual context than in a collocated one. When people share physical space, the ambient noise of collective work — overhearing conversations, running into colleagues at the coffee machine, reading the room in a meeting — provides a low-level, continuous stream of coordination information that compensates for weak team design. Remove the physical environment, and these informal compensating mechanisms disappear entirely. The team’s structural properties suddenly become the primary determinant of whether collaborative work actually happens.
The research bears this out. A 2022 integrative review published in the context of the International Academic Symposium of Social Science identified six categories of factors that shape virtual team performance: individual factors; group dynamics and member interactions; contextual factors; technology-mediated communication; trust; and leadership [1]. What is notable about this framework is what sits at the top of the priority list in the empirical literature: not leadership style or communication tools, but the foundational architecture of how work is designed. Before we can have a meaningful conversation about optimising any of those other six categories, we need to understand the nature of the team itself — and that begins with interdependence.