Organizational Design and Core Technologies for Virtual Collaboration: How to Shape the Conditions Under Which the Team Can Thrive

This chapter introduces the organizational design challenge of virtual team collaboration and provides you with tools for mastering it. The starting point lies in becoming aware of the organizational dimension of work, and to understand how the images of organization which one has in mind unconsciously shape one’s work-related actions. Next, it discusses which organizational structures are more or less helpful for high-performance virtual team collaboration, also concerning bureaucracy. It also highlights the properties and challenges of human-machine or human-technology-interaction in socio-technical systems, such as virtual teams, and provides you with three main design options for configuring organizational core technologies.