The rapid changes of work, the ease of mobility, and ubiquitous use of virtual tools have fundamentally changed the way that teamwork in modern organizations is accomplished.Although these developments have elicited a broad range of studies focusing on the phenomenon of team virtuality, the construct itself is still tied to conceptual ambiguities, opposing theoretical underpinnings, and inconsistent findings. The present paper synthesizes the structural and social-constructivist elements of team virtuality in order to introduce the novel concept of team perceived virtuality (TPV), embedded within a theoretical model of its team-level emergence. We define team perceived virtuality as a cognitive-affective team emergent state which is grounded in collectively experienced feelings of distance and perceptions of information deficits. We further describe how TPV emerges as a function of team members' collectively developed co-constructions and identify antecedents that contribute towards this emergence. By disentangling perceptions from structural properties, the present paper conceptually advances our understanding of team virtuality beyond its structural characteristics. Ultimately, this conceptual work serves as a starting point for future research on team virtuality as a collectively constructed, team-level emergent construct.

This review study aimed to investigate how team work design shapes the impact of team virtuality on team functioning. Based on 48 studies, we identified key work design variables that influence both team functioning, that is, team performance and intermediary outcomes (i.e., team processes and emergent states), under conditions of high virtuality (or in interaction with virtuality). First, while outcome interdependence showed positive effects on the functioning of virtual teams, particularly via motivational increases, task interdependence showed mixed results. Second, high levels of knowledge characteristics (e.g., task complexity) appear to worsen team functioning within virtual contexts, likely because these characteristics add to the demands of an already demanding context. Third, job resources (e.g., feedback) showed positive associations with team functioning, suggesting these variables might buffer the high demands of virtual work. Given these results, more investigations that explicitly examine the interaction between work design and team virtuality are needed.

Meetings often dominate software projects. Despite frequent dissatisfaction within meetings, many software engineers are not aware of the crucial importance about their behavior. This can set the tone for the entire project and influence the success. In a study based on 32 student development teams with 155 participants, we observed the participants' interactions during the first internal team meeting. Analyzing the observations showed that constructive remarks had a positive impact on positive group affect tone. However, this effect can only be observed when supportive utterances followed constructive remarks. In the article, we show a complete mediation of this statistically significant effect, e.g., about seemingly subtle interaction patterns that influence group affect tone. We also propose practical interventions on how software projects could benefit from supportive meeting behavior. This summary refers to the article "Positive affect through interactions in meetings: The role of proactive and supportive statements" [Sc18] published in the Journal of Systems & Software in 2018 (vol. 143).

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