Developing Team Cohesiveness in a Virtual Environment

When specialized technical skills are needed within a project team and issues of distance and time restrictions occur, the project manager must create a dispersed virtual project management team (VPMT). However, management of such a virtual team requires extraordinary effort on the leader’s and team members’ parts in both teamwork and cooperation in order to have an effective and successful outcome. In addition, the ability for the team to exchange information, transfer files, and strengthen their ability to use technology contributes to the outcome of the project. This raises a fundamental question: How do effective project managers use team communication, relationship building, and project management elements in dispersed virtual project teams to influence overall project success when team members have little face-to-face interaction? This paper focuses on research conducted on distributed project management teams that had to rely on a virtual, technologically driven environment for coordination and communication of project tasks and objectives throughout the life of the project. The investigation concentrated on seeking the dispersed project team member who could function effectively as an interconnected and cooperative team member in order to achieve project success even though not co-located with other team members. The key element of interest for this study involved uncovering the phenomena behind the ability to bring together commonality of purpose in projects where there are differing individual views of effectiveness and lack of daily communication in a virtual environment.