Abstract
The expansion of organisations causes them into offering their products or services and/or
consuming products and services that are offered abroad. It is no longer sufficient for
organisations to operate locally if their desire is to reach their full potential. Broadening their
scope provides the organisations with the desired growth.
For the link between organisations and their offshore customers or suppliers to exist there
needs to be communication across borders. Teams are formed between the different
employees from the different locations to achieve a specified goal. The team members are not
co-located and they need the assistance of information communications technology (ICT)
tools to communicate with one another. This kind of team is referred to as a virtual team.
A lot of attention has been given to virtual teams over the years but despite this attention, there
is still little knowledge available about how to manage them (Dulebohn & Hoch, 2017). This
indicates that there is still an opportunity to explore the success factors of virtual teams.
Poor management of projects can cause the failure of a project (Anantatmula & Rad, 2013).
This suggests that an organisation should invest in the maturity of their project management
to ensure the success of their virtual projects.
The research goal is to investigate the influence that information and communication
technology tools and project management maturity has on the performance of virtual
teams. This research looks at extended factors on virtual team performance which
are: leadership, communication and trust. A good leader needs to have good
communication skills in order to successfully coordinate a virtual team. Trust is
needed for the virtual team to have honest communication among themselves.
Face to face contact in virtual teams is minimal to none, affecting the performance of
a virtual team and impacting on the authority and leadership in the virtual team. This
also has an impact on the trust among virtual team members and the level of
accountability by virtual team members.
Virtual teams rely on ICT tools for communication and these tools are emerging at a
frequent rate. This research aims to discover if keeping up with emerging ICT tools
can supply virtual team members with improved communication which in turn will
improve their performance...
M.Tech. (Applied Information Systems)