Virtual meetings and tasks: from GSS to DGSS to project management

Much of the work in today's organizations is accomplished by distributed, or "virtual" project teams, rather than by work groups meeting in traditional face-to-face meetings. This paper investigates to what extent results from earlier GSS (group support systems) research are being applied to distributed environments, and to what extent more recent research in distributed GSS (DGSS) acknowledges and supports the evolution of work to a distributed project management context. The paper begins with a summary of GSS in face-to-face (FTF) settings, based on two recent meta-analyses, and then analyzes recent selected research literature focused on DGSS and distributed project teams. The results of the analysis provide a foundation for identifying gaps in virtual project team research, and for discussing implications for research and practice.