Outsourcing has become common in the U.S. and brings forth a new way of managing people. Now there are managers that need to manage offshore teams; meaning the manager and some group members are here and the rest of the group is in a foreign country. The manager often never meets the people he/she is managing face to face and communication is done through technology. We have discussed how technology eliminates the human aspect in previous chapters and I'm interested to see how these groups work together. I know a few people that work with offshore teams and it usually involves late night conference calls and email. I wonder if group members actually connect with each other despite never meeting face to face. I also would like to research how the manager "gets to know" offshore team members and what difficulties they face. Other related research would include the frequency of communication and the medium.
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My colleague at U of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Myria Watkins Allen, is interested in this topic as well. There is some research on communication and multinational teams that work together either all or primarily online. Sometimes they're called multinational virtual teams. Search in both the communication and business databases for articles.
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