The Strength of Virtuality in Teams: Social Capital built on Weak Ties

Research into virtual teams has long focused on "glass half-empty" comparisons with "traditional" teams, exploring the ramifications of technology-mediated interactions that lack the social context and cues of face-to-face encounters. With this paper we extend an emerging argument for a new perspective focusing instead on a more optimistic picture in which the glass is actually half-full and technology-mediated interactions play a positive role alongside face-to-face interactions in teams. To achieve this we employ social capital, and in particular "weak ties", as a sensitizing concept or lens through which to view the emerging perspective of "virtuality", defined in terms of "discontinuities" in teams. The thinking this develops is used to examine data gathered from a year-long case study of a UK government-funded "virtual centre of excellence". The findings highlight task and membership boundaries as unique additional discontinuities to be considered in the definition of virtuality