The Effect of Virtual Work Environments and Social Systems on Human Capital and Assets

In recent decades, advances in information technology (IT) have fundamentally altered the outlook of organizations with respect to the identification, development, and deployment of human capital. Specifically, IT is widely credited with enabling new organizational forms and expanding access to talent by reducing the coordination challenges of distance and compressing the time required to communicate information among teams and organizations (Fulk & DeSanctis, 1995; Privman, Hiltz, & Wang, 2013). The combination of IT advances and flexible approaches to organizational design has led to a dramatic increase in distributed work, or distributed teaming, environments (Aubert & Kelsey, 2003). The Internet enables project team members in distant locales to work together on common projects efficiently and cost-effectively. As a result, many enterprises today are engaging employees who are not physically present at traditional organizational locations—enabling them to participate in teams that seldom, if ever, meet face to face. Such workers shoulder the same responsibilities and challenges as collocated employees, coupled with the added challenges of managing culture, process, and goal dynamics unique to distributed teams (Chuang, Jackson, & Jiang, 2013).