University of Groningen

Faculty of Management and Organisation

Department of Business Informatics

PO Box 800

NL 9700 AV Groningen

The Netherlands

The virtual organisation (VO) is viewed as an organisation consisting of independent partners, who try to combine their strengths, skills, resources, risks and finances in order to produce ideas or a product. Members of the VO are often geographically dispersed and communicate with help of information technology. The VO is a popular organisation structure, but it is also known that the VO is difficult to manage. Members work rather individual and there is hardly any control. Some problems of the VO are that it is difficult to motivate its members, members suffer from social loafing and absenteeism. On the other hand it is unclear how such an organisation can reach a synergetic or learning effect by co-operating with each other’s core competencies. Learning is inhibited by several organisational boundaries of a VO. These boundaries are within time, space, structure, diversity and distribution of results and information. Current literature on learning, does not often take into account the geographical dispersion and fluctuating workforce of a VO, although some do take into account learning between organisational partners (Hamel 1991, Nonaka 1995).

In Sweden a research virtual organisation was followed for three years, where the main question was: how is knowledge developed in a VO. Important aspects were to investigate boundaries and enablers of knowledge development in a VO, the role of management and the role of IT in this development process. The data was collected with help of interviews, observations and questionnaires. It was found in the research VO, that besides a high use of e-mail for communication and information distribution, rich modes of communication were important (e.g., telephone and face-to-face). However, due to several reasons the information system was not often used. Furthermore, it was found that the expectations of members were of importance for the success of the organisation. The expectations of members are based on past experiences, personal values, professional specialisation and the role in hierarchy (Ring & Van de Ven, 1994). Depending on expectations of members, a match or mismatch with the content of the work, the role of members, the development process of the organisation, the way information and results were distributed and the role of the autonomous partners could be seen. A difference in expectations could be viewed between project leaders and project members, where project leaders had a low to moderate vague expectation, while project members often had a high to moderate expectation, which was more detailed described. For the development of knowledge in a VO, it might be important, that management could harmonise the expectations of its members. Expectation management is proposed as stimulating, maintaining and creating expectations within a VO, in order to overcome the earlier mentioned problems of a VO.