Mid Sweden University

The advances in technology over the last decades have created opportunities for multinational companies to create new kind of teams. These so called Global Virtual Teams (GVT) only communicate virtually and have because of this allowed members to be located all over the world without being limited to any certain location and thus making the teams culturally diverse. Because of the fact that GVTs are multicultural as well as virtual, the effectiveness ofthe GVTs has been questioned. The most critical challenges of GVTs has been described to be communication, trust and relationship building, and these challenges have been described to exist because of the lack of face-to-face interactions which are considered to be important in order to be able to communicate, create trust and build relationships effectively. However, theimportance of face-to-face interactions has been questioned by a small but a growing number of researches. To get a deeper understanding of how these challenges pose challenges for GVTs, semi-structured interviews have been conducted with eight leaders of GVTs in order to see how they perceive these challenges in their teams. The results indicated that the challenges might not pose as great challenges and might not either be as present in GVTs asthey have been portrayed in previous studies.