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Virtual team

A virtual team (also known as a geographically dispersed team, distributed team, or remote team ) usually refers to a group of individuals who work together from different geographic locations and rely on communication technology such as email, instant messaging, and video or voice conferencing services in order to collaborate. The term can also refer to groups or teams that work together asynchronously or across organizational levels. Powell, Piccoli and Ives (2004) define virtual teams as "groups of geographically, organizationally and/or time dispersed workers brought together by information and telecommunication technologies to accomplish one or more organizational tasks." As documented by Gibson (2020), virtual teams grew in importance and number during 2000-2020, particularly in light of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic which forced many workers to collaborate remotely with each other as they worked from home.

As the proliferation of fiber optic technology has significantly increased the scope of off-site communication,  there has been a tremendous increase in both the use of virtual teams and scholarly attention devoted to understanding how to make virtual teams more effective (see Stanko & Gibson, 2009; Hertel, Geister & Konradt, 2005; and Martins, Gilson & Maaynard, 2004 for reviews). When utilized successfully, virtual teams allow companies to procure the best expertise without geographical restrictions, to integrate information, knowledge, and resources from a broad variety of contexts within the same team, and to acquire and apply knowledge to critical tasks in global firms. According to Hambley, O'Neil, & Kline (2007), "virtual teams require new ways of working across boundaries through systems, processes, technology, and people, which requires effective leadership." Such work often involves learning processes such as integrating and sharing different location-specific knowledge and practices, which must work in concert for the multi-unit firm to be aligned. Yet, teams with a high degree of "virtuality" are not without their challenges, and when managed poorly, they often underperform face-to-face (FTF) teams.

In light of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, many industries experienced a rapid and overnight transition to virtual work as a result of "social distancing." However, some scholars have argued the phrase "social distancing" in reference to the practice of physical distancing between colleagues may have dangerous connotations, potentially increasing prejudice based on age or ethnicity, isolation due to limited options for interpersonal contact, and hopelessness, given the focus on prohibitions rather than solutions. Today, most work teams have become virtual to some degree, though the literature has yet to incorporate the dynamic urgency of the pandemic and the impacts of rapid-fire learning of new technology and communication skills.

Origins
The acceleration of digital technologies has allowed common, even synchronous activities to be distributed across employees at remote locations. These decentralized work arrangements were first named telework in the 1970s, defined as "work carried out in a location remote from the central offices or production facilities, where the worker has no personal contact with coworkers but is able to communicate with them electronically". Typically, the remote location is the home, though telework centers and remote offices are alternative locations. Since the introduction of home computers in the 1980s and laptops and mobile phones in the 1990s, increasing numbers of office workers have become able to work from different locations. Moreover, the shift from manufacturing to an information economy has expanded the number of jobs amenable to remote work. Telecommuting is referred to as telework, remote work, distributed work, virtual work, flexible work, flexplace, and distance work, among other labels.

Investigations of such flexible work locations began in earnest over 30 years ago (see Ramsower, 1983). Distributed work and telecommuting have become widespread practices, growing steadily in the United States and abroad. A 2002 study by the Gartner Group indicated that more than 60% of professional American employees worked in teams characterized by virtuality, and by 2012, nearly 3.3 million American workers telecommuted for at least half of the time. Globally, an international survey of 254 senior-level executives revealed that staff in two thirds of their global firms were involved in distributed work.

Early research heralded virtual teams as a promising design for integrating firms and taking maximum advantage of innovation-creating capabilities. They were likewise touted as means to permit flexibility in the "where" of tasks, to allow workers to meet household needs, and to enable organizations to adapt work arrangements to changing environments and labor needs. According to Gibson and Gibbs (2006: 453), the term "virtual" represents a wide variety of teams that are at least to some extent geographically dispersed (consisting of members spread across more than one location), mediated by technology (communicating using electronic tools such as e-mail or instant messaging), structurally dynamic (in which change occurs frequently among members, their roles, and relationships to each other), or nationally diverse (consisting of members with more than one national background). Much of the literature has focused on the challenges of virtual teams, while few have identified their assets and benefits, identifying strategies by which to increase team effectiveness and satisfaction. As technological ability and industry contexts are rapidly and continuously changing, virtual work represents a promising avenue of research as an ever-evolving, fundamental shift in how organizations have historically done business.

Defining Features
The four defining features of a virtual team – geographic dispersion, electronic dependence, national diversity, and dynamic structure – have unique effects and should be considered independently. For example, although electronic dependence sometimes coincides with geographic dispersion, this is not always the case; teams in the same office may use e-mail to avoid the trip up to another floor, and teams in different countries may prefer to meet face-to-face infrequently rather than use video calls. As such, there is conceptual agreement that virtuality is a multidimensional higher-order construct. Rather than being dichotomous "on-off" conditions, these four features of virtuality each represent a continuum, and the degree of difference influences the strength of its effects. These four factors will be explored in further detail below. Geographic dispersion refers to the degree of physical distance between team colleagues. A team that spans multiple continents is more dispersed than one whose participants are located in the same city, and this degree of dispersion in turn modulates the severity of outcomes. Electronic dependence refers to the degree of reliance on electronic tools such as e-mail or instant messaging for communications.

National diversity refers to the number of different nationalities represented on the team. Virtual teams may consist of members of a single nationality (e.g. a software team split between the American East and West Coasts, but who all share American nationality or a global team of Germans who work in different countries, but all share German nationality). Colleagues from different nations may bring different cultural values, mindsets, allegiances, and communication styles to the team.

Dynamic structure/membership refers to how often members leave and join the team, and to how stable or changeable members’ roles are. Rather than having stable membership, many virtual teams are short-term and project-based, or involve frequent member turnover.

Overview
According to Gibson and Cohen (2003), the effectiveness of virtual teams is a function of enabling conditions, which are created and supported by managers and leaders, and do not work independently but rather in concert with one another through multiple performance strategies. Multiple design and implementation factors help to create the conditions that support virtual team effectiveness. These factors include organizational context, team design, technology use, team member characteristics, and work and team processes. Virtuality amplifies the challenges faced by teams. As teams become more virtual, they confront greater uncertainty and complexity, increasing the difficulty of the information processing and sensemaking tasks they face. Likewise, the greater the number and depth of differences that need to be managed in virtual teams, the greater the barriers to effectiveness. These teams must be designed, supported, and led effectively to be successful. When they are well supported, virtual teams enable the best talent irrespective of location, capitalize on each organization’s unique competencies, and bring together people from different perspectives and knowledge bases, leading to higher levels of innovation. This orienting framework is explained in more detail below.

Enabling Conditions
For virtual teams to perform well, three enabling conditions must be established: (1) shared understanding about the team’s goals, tasks, work processes, and member characteristics; (2) integration or coordination across key organizational systems and structures; and (3) mutual trust in the team.

Shared understanding is the degree of cognitive overlap and commonality in beliefs, expectations, and perceptions about a given target. Virtual teams need to develop a shared understanding about their goals, their tasks, how to achieve them, and what each team member brings to the team.

Integration is the process of establishing ways in which the parts can work together to create value, develop products, or deliver services. The parts of the organization represented by virtual team members are likely to be highly differentiated in response to global competitive pressures and uncertain business environments, potentially hindering effective collaboration. Notably, the lower the level of integration, the greater the difficulty of developing shared understanding.

Mutual or collective trust is a shared psychological state that is characterized by an acceptance of vulnerability based on expectations of intentions or behaviors of others within the team. As members are geographically dispersed and often from different backgrounds, experiences, and cultures, trust is difficult to establish in virtual teams. Thus, it is how the team is designed and managed that creates enabling conditions.

Design Factors
There are a number of structures and systems which critically enable virtual team success. Design of a virtual team involves structuring the interactions; what kind of communication tools are used; how much face-to-face time will be possible, etc. These design factors fall into five categories: context, group structure, technology, people, and process.

First, those structures that comprise the organizational context include education and training, rewards, reviews such as performance evaluation systems, and selection. Second, the virtual team’s structure works to promote task accomplishment through goals, leadership, task design, and social structures. Third, information technology provides the infrastructure for virtual collaboration by allowing teams to communicate and coordinate their work. The challenge here is determining which technologies are appropriate for what tasks and when. Fourth, the people who work in virtual teams should possess certain capabilities to work effectively with others, such as sufficient task related knowledge and skills. Further, team members need to have a tolerance for ambiguity to deal with the unstructured communication that characterizes virtual teamwork. Finally, one’s team and work processes can help or hinder the creation of enabling conditions. This includes the creation of effectives means of communication, decision making, and conflict resolution by leaders and managers.

Virtuality and Degree of Differences
As explored above, Gibson & Cohen (2003) indicated that the relationship between design factors and enabling conditions is moderated by the degree of virtuality and degree of differences. It follows that the greater the degree of virtuality and degree of differences, the more difficult it will be to establish supportive enabling conditions. The degree of virtuality includes the degree of electronic dependency and geographical dispersion, while the degree of differences includes the degree of variation in culture, language, organization, and function.

Outputs
The outputs of virtual work include all the things that result from the team’s work processes. These can be organized into two categories: business outcomes and human outcomes. Possible business outcomes are goal achievement, productivity, timeliness, customer satisfaction, organization learning, innovation, and cycle time. Possible human outcomes include team member attitudes such as commitment, satisfaction, and longevity, i.e., the capacity to work together in the future.

Often, these judgments of performance are subjective and depend on the team’s manager or other stakeholders in its social system. Studies have found that effectiveness can increase the greater the virtuality of a team, but only when many of the features in the framework are in place. For example, teams which fostered a shared identity by communicating consistently, developing relationships, and openly acknowledging cultural differences were better able to harness the energy and commitment of members. Such strong team identity may help to allow for constructive controversy which enables the open sharing of views, knowledge and perspective coinciding with members’ identities. As Gibson and co-authors (2020) found, teams with high resilience, tolerance for ambiguity, and strong team identification experienced less intrapersonal identity conflict and therefore thrived more at work. Likewise, formalization processes that help to establish the global team as a source of identity, such as implementing rules and procedures early on and clarifying team boundaries, increase knowledge sharing and thus improve team effectiveness.

Gibson and her colleagues (2021) further found that virtual teams were more effective when they were able to recognize cues indicating when existing technologies had become constraints and strategically change their technology affordances to accommodate shifts in knowledge management activities. Teams which used a "dynamic connection repertoire" to co-evolve their purpose and technology were highly successful, as opposed to teams which failed to shift to different technologies as task needs changed.

Other studies have compared students working in purely virtual teams to purely face-to-face teams and found mixed results. Tan et al. found that teams which used their dialogue technique were more satisfied with decisions made in the team. One study found that a traditional team started out more satisfied than a virtual team. Then, in less than a year, the satisfaction of the virtual team rose and exceeded the satisfaction of the traditional team. Women were more satisfied than men with virtual teams and were also more satisfied compared to women in face-to-face teams. Team members that were more satisfied were more likely to have had training and used more communication methods compared to unsatisfied team members.

Types
The most common types of virtual teams include:

1.     Networked teams

2.     Parallel teams

3.     Project development teams

4.     Work, production or functional teams

5.     Service teams

6.     Offshore ISD teams

7.     Global Virtual Teams

Networked teams
Generally, networked teams are geographically distributed and not necessarily from the same organization. These teams are frequently created and just as frequently dissolved; they are usually formed to discuss specific topics where members from the area of expertise, possibly from different organizations, pitch their ideas in the same discussion. Depending on the complexity of the issue, additional members to the team may be added at any time. The duration these teams last may vary significantly depending on how fast or slow the issue is resolved.

Parallel teams
Parallel teams are highly task oriented teams that usually consist of specialized professionals. While they are generally only required for short spans of time, unlike networked teams, they are not dissolved after completion of the tasks. The team may be either internal or external to the organization.

Project development teams
Similar to parallel teams, these teams are geographically distributed and may operate from different time zones. Project development teams are mainly focused on creating new products, information systems or organizational processes for users and/or customers. These teams exist longer than parallel teams and have the added ability to make decisions rather than just make recommendations. Similar to networked teams, project development teams may also add or remove members of their team at any given time, as needed for their area of expertise.

Work, production or functional teams
These teams are totally function specific where they only work on a particular area within an organization (i.e. finance, training, research, etc.). Operating virtually from different geographical locations, these teams exist to perform regular or ongoing tasks.

Service teams
Service teams are geographically located in different time-zones and are assigned to a particular service such as customer support, network upgrades, data maintenance, etc. Each team works on providing the particular service in their daylight hours and at the end of day, work is delegated to the next team which operates in a different time zone so that there is someone handling the service 24 hours a day.

Offshore ISD teams
Offshore ISD outsourcing teams are independent service provider teams that a company can subcontract portions of work to. These teams usually work in conjunction with an onshore team. Offshore ISD is commonly used for software development as well as international R&D projects.

Global virtual teams
Global Virtual Teams (GVT) are defined as "a group of workers, formally recognized by the organization as a team, with members from different countries who are collectively accountable for outputs across locations, and who utilize technology to some degree to accomplish their work". These teams usually span multiple countries and excel at their ability to transfer best practices across sites, resulting in substantial improvements in operations. However, they may struggle with establishing effective communication which engenders trust and engages team members.

Management
According to Maznevksi and Chudoba (2000), the life circle of virtual team management includes five stages:

1.     Preparations

2.     Launch

3.     Performance management

4.     Team development

5.     Disbanding

Preparations
The initial task during the implementation of a team is the definition of the general purpose of the team together with the determination of the level of virtuality that might be appropriate to achieve these goals. Purpose is generally translated into certain action steps for people to on with a defined structure consisting of common goals, individual tasks and results. A number of factors may affect the performance of members of a virtual team. For example, team members with a higher degree of focused attention and aggregate lower levels of temporal dissociation (or flow ) may have higher performance. Further, members with higher degrees of attention focus may prefer asynchronous communication channels, while those with low levels of flow may prefer synchronous communication channels. These decisions are usually determined by strategic factors such as mergers, increase of the market span, cost reductions, flexibility and reactivity to the market, etc. Management-related activities taking place during the preparation phase include drafting a mission statement, personnel selection, task design, rewards system design, organizational integration, and choosing appropriate technologies for the tasks at hand.

Launch
In many cases, at the beginning of virtual teamwork, members make a point to meet each other face-to-face. Crucial elements of such a "kick-off" workshop are getting acquainted with the other team members, clarifying the team goals, clarifying the roles and functions of the team members, information and training how communication technologies can be used efficiently, and developing general rules for the teamwork. As a consequence, "kick-off" workshops are expected to promote clarification of team processes, trust building, building of a shared interpretative context, and high identification with the team.

Getting acquainted, goal clarification and development of intra-team rules are also usually accomplished during this phase. Initial field data that compares virtual teams with and without such "kick-off" meetings confirm a general positive impact on team effectiveness, although more differentiated research is necessary. Experimental studies demonstrate that getting acquainted before the start of computer-mediated work facilitates cooperation and trust.

Technology Agility
As soon as possible after launch, virtual teams must agree upon norms for technology use. Technology is essential to members’ interaction and communication. The electronic dependence integral to virtual work can however create logistical and technological constraints that limit informal spontaneous interacting and informal feedback, hindering knowledge interpretation and making corrective behavior more difficult. Therefore, team members must choose technology carefully, in order to offer the affordances needed at a given point in time, as each technology brings with it a number of affordances as well as constraints for interaction. An affordance is a purpose for use, and technology affordances refer to the mutually supportive relationship between human-endowed purposes to an activity and the technology use. Importantly, the need for certain affordances change over time as teams’ tasks evolve. Gibson and her colleagues (2021) found that teams which were the most successful in progressing across different knowledge management activities used a "dynamic connection repertoire", which is symbiotic with the nature of the task as it evolves over time. Rather than keeping a static technology repertoire, teams which co-evolved their purpose and technology affordances were better able to sustain effectiveness. A series of psychosocial cues were identified by Gibson and her colleagues, which signal the need to shift to different technologies, because the current technology use is failing to meet the teams’ needs. These cues pertained to how well information was being shared and understood by all team members, and the extent to which members were engaged in the team. Technologies which allow for higher media richness, such as video and screen-sharing, can help reduce inconsistencies in context and make communication more personal and effective.

Performance Management
As time progresses in a virtual team, work effectiveness and a constructive team climate also have to be maintained using performance management strategies, such as those associated with leadership, conflict within virtual teams, and team members' motivation.

Leadership is a central challenge in virtual teams, as direct control is difficult when team managers are not at the same location as the team members. As a consequence, delegative management principles are considered that shift parts of classic managerial functions to the team members. However, team members only accept and fulfill such managerial functions when they are motivated and identify with the team and its goals, which is typically more difficult to achieve in virtual teams.Empirical research summarizes three leadership approaches that differ in the degree of team member autonomy: (1) electronic monitoring as an attempt to realize directive leadership over distance, (2) management by objectives (MBO) as an example for delegative leadership principles, and (3) self-managing teams as an example for rather autonomous teamwork.

With regard to conflict, predominant research issues have been conflict escalation and disinhibited communication ("flaming"), the fit between communication media and communication contents, and the role of non-job-related communication. One of the important needs for successful conflict resolution is the ability to have every member of the group together repeatedly over time. Effective dispersed groups show spikes in presence during communication over time, while ineffective groups do not have as dramatic spikes.

For the management of motivational and emotional processes, three groups of such processes have been addressed in empirical investigations so far: motivation and trust, team identification and cohesion, and satisfaction of the team members. Since most of the variables are originated within the person, they can vary considerably among the members of a team, requiring appropriate aggregation procedures for multilevel analyses (e.g. motivation may be mediated by interpersonal trust ).

Team Development
The success and satisfaction of virtual teams can be supported by personnel and team development interventions. The development of such training concepts should be based on an empirical assessment of the needs and/or deficits of the team and its members, and the effectiveness of the trainings should be evaluated empirically. The steps of team developments include assessment of needs/deficits, individual and team training, and evaluation of training effects. Assessing behaviors of the team members to identify behavioral cues may improve virtual team dynamics and increase team productivity. Behaviors may be assessed through DiSC assessments.

Virtual teams have become more pertinent due to Covid-19. For managers, some of the ways to foster virtual team growth and success include monitoring trust levels, focusing on communication improvements, fostering inclusion via emotional safety within a group, and actively discussing teamwork with the group frequently.

Disbanding and Re-integration
Finally, while some teams remain ongoing and continue with new tasks or members, some virtual teams with shorter time frames go through a phase of disbanding and reintegration, during which members return to in-person offices or join other virtual projects. This disbanding and reintegration of team members is an important issue that has been neglected in both empirical and conceptual work on virtual teams. When virtual project teams have a short life cycle and reform again quickly, careful and constructive disbanding is crucial in order to maintain high motivation and satisfaction among employees. Members of transient project teams anticipate the end of the teamwork in the foreseeable future, which in turn can overshadow interaction with other team members and shared outcomes. The final stage of group development should be a gradual emotional disengagement that includes both sadness about separation and (in successful groups) joy and pride in the achievements of the team.

Team Composition
Virtual teams may help to create a more equal workplace, discouraging age, race, and disability discrimination by forcing individuals to interact with others whose differences challenge their assumptions. Physically disadvantaged employees are also able to participate more in teams where communication is virtual, where they may not have previously been able to due to physical limitations of an office or other workspace. Virtual teams also create a more accessible workplace for those who care for children or other family members, or workers who prefer flexible work arrangements for a wide range of reasons. By enabling more flexible and equal working conditions, virtual teams significantly expand the pool of available expertise, thereby allowing firms to acquire the best possible candidates.

Moreover, virtual teams’ use of communication technologies also helps to mitigate some problems of cultural diversity. For instance, email as a medium of communication does not transfer accents and carries fewer noticeable verbal language differences than voice communication. Cultural barriers are not removed from the team, but are instead shielded from view in situations where they are irrelevant. In fact, simply understanding team diversity and accommodating it can strengthen the relationship between team members of different cultures.

Innovation
When managed effectively, virtual teams can be highly effective in promoting innovation, creativity, and participation. For example, in Gibson and Gibbs’ (2006) study of design team innovation, teams were more innovative as virtuality increased when they had a psychologically safe communication climate. Because a company is able to recruit from a larger pool of employees when using virtual teams, a growing amount of talent and distributed expertise is obtainable without the employee traveling often. The use of virtual teams also allows employees to participate in multiple projects within the company that are located on different sites. This in turn helps the company by allowing them to reuse existing resources so that they are not required to hire a new employee to do the same job.

Chidambaram and Bostrom (1993) found that virtual teams generate more ideas compared to traditional teams. Part of this effect can be attributed to cultural diversity, which has been shown to positively impact group decision-making. Combined with collaborative conflict management, groups of individuals from different cultural perspectives are more likely to actively participate in group decision making. The differing backgrounds and experiences of these group members also encourage creativity and create conflicting viewpoints, which make it more likely that multiple options are explored and considered.

Geographic Reach
Multinational organizations often deploy global teams which span various national locations to serve as mechanisms for coordinating core operations across geographical and cultural boundaries. These virtual teams help to enhance knowledge sharing and integration across company locations, thereby expanding the geographic reach of firm operations at relatively low cost. Virtual teams further boost firms’ ability to identify and transfer best practices across locations, resulting in a substantial improvement to the operational efficiency of each site while preventing any one site from "re-inventing the wheel".

National Diversity
Though national diversity may sometimes lead to conflicts and poor internal communication among team members due to differing ideas of a team and its operation, when managed correctly, virtual teams enable firms to take advantage of diverse and creative viewpoints. Notably, virtual teams are susceptible to intrapersonal identity conflict and struggle to develop a shared team vision due to strong identification with subgroups. Yet, these coordination problems and obstacles to effective communication may be solved by actively understanding and accepting differences in cultures. A multi-country study, based on the GLOBE culture model conducted by Gibson and Gibbs (2006), found that virtual communication environments were experienced differently by people from different cultures. The culture dimension individualism-collectivism was most strongly and very significantly related to how positively or negatively team members experienced videoconferences and telephone conferences, compared to face-to-face meetings. People from collectivistic societies showed a stronger preference for face-to-face meetings and evaluated virtual meetings more negatively compared to people from more individualistic societies.

However, Haas (2006) discovered that a mix of locals and cosmopolitans was optimal for global virtual team performance. Research examining product development efforts in over 20 firms has shown that when diverse members of project teams combined their perspectives in a highly iterative way to improve integrated information flow, they were more innovative. This is echoed by Gibbs and Gibson’s 2006 study which established that a psychologically safe communication climate where members feel comfortable asking questions can help bridge national differences, reduce ingroup/outgroup bias, and resolve conflicts, as teams who communicate openly are more likely to develop a common frame of reference and shared mental model. Ultimately, the exchange of diverse perspectives and information among global team members has been found to improve team and organizational performance through the generation of better knowledge sharing and higher quality solutions.

Reduction in Relocation and Travel
Virtual teams can save travel time and cost, significant expenses for businesses with multiple locations or having virtual clients located in multiple places. They also reduce disruption in the normal workday by not requiring an individual to physically leave their workspace. This improved efficiency can directly translate to saved costs for a company.

Strategies to Mitigate Challenges of Virtual Work
Despite the improvement in telecommunication to overcome distance as an obstacle for collaboration, working in separate locations still increases the odds that people are not on common ground, and are not aware of it. Common ground, shared mutual knowledge, is an important element to successful communication and coordinated activity. Working separately and communicating through technology makes it more difficult to detect and resolve misunderstandings from a lack of common ground. As such, virtual teams often require a longer time to reach decisions.

However, virtual work has implications for relational impoverishment at work due to lower frequency of face-to-face interactions and lowered richness of communication. One major hurdle in drawing definitive conclusions is that studies of this innovation appear in dispersed literatures including information systems, logistics, industrial relations, psychology, operations, real estate, management, attracting the interest of scholars in multiple disciplines. Findings regarding challenges are presented below, but it is important to note that many mainstream models, largely developed with face-to-face workers in mind, often fail to account for the way telecommuters and virtual workers have challenged traditional labor structures.

Technology and Common Ground
When team members are highly dispersed, members are embedded in different external contexts and thus have less shared contextual knowledge, leading participants to take for granted common knowledge. Sole and Edmondson (2002) call this "situated knowledge," finding evidence that the majority of conceptual misunderstandings resulted from lack of awareness of or failure to appropriate such knowledge. Such lack of mutual knowledge of each other’s situations increases coordination problems in acquiring knowledge and resources. Transactive memory is difficult to establish in virtual teams as it is often not transferred to new members, contextual knowledge is not kept or well-documented, and communication is indirect or infrequent. Development of this type of common ground is particularly difficult in virtual teams which are structurally dynamic or experience high turnover, as teams with a short history together tend to lack effective patterns of information sharing and working together, limiting the amount and variety of information that can be communicated across team members.

One way to develop common ground in virtual teams is to develop a psychologically safe communication climate which acts as a moderating variable that can overcome mistrust and turn the team’s fluid membership into a source of new ideas and expertise. A supportive communication climate includes variables such as participation in decision-making, encouraging members to speak up, raising differences for discussion, engaging in spontaneous and informal communication, providing unsolicited information, remaining open to new ideas and perspectives, and bridging differences by suspending judgment. This helps to create trust and reduce perceptions of risk and uncertainty about members’ motives, in turn creating incentives to build a shared history.

Another way to develop common knowledge rests on managers’ ability to act as politicians to manage the power dynamic inside and outside the team. This may reduce members’ hesitancy to share information, leading to enhanced innovation. A study by Gibbs and her colleagues (2021) indicates that managers can also bridge imbalances in situated knowledge during meetings by discussing trivial topics and surfacing taken-for-granted assumptions as a way to elicit differing opinions and hidden knowledge. In one instance, a manager increased dialogue among team members by deliberately refraining from giving people answers in order to encourage them to cooperate and co-create knowledge. Though more difficult than in collocated teams, careful management and co-presence strategies can successfully establish common ground among members of a virtual team.

Uneven Distribution of Information
Errors in the distribution of messages are more common in technology than face-to-face interaction, leading to a lack of common ground. When digital technology replaces face-to-face communication, it is often difficult to keep track of the messages that have been both sent and received by a receiver and vice versa. For instance, if collaborators have two email addresses, a primary and a secondary one, some messages may be sent by the server to the primary addresses and some to the secondary addresses, leading to information loss and confusion among team members. Intimacy is further threatened as perceived electronic mediation increases because such mediation leads to uneven information transfer and coordination challenges and reduces the amount of informal interaction, as the number of casual encounters and unplanned conversations is much higher among collocated colleagues.

Simultaneously, differences in native language and status- the "prestige, esteem, worth, or relative social position of an individual or group" - inhibit open dialogue and can lead to uneven participation, one-way flows of knowledge, and exclusion. These status differences are subjective and socially constructed through interpersonal processes of stratification that play out in both verbal and nonverbal communication. Consequently, teams which foster an open dialogic environment through conversational turn-taking, active listening, and energy-enhancing practices achieve better participation and overcome status differences, in turn boosting collective intelligence and limiting miscommunications.

Strategies to mitigate uneven distribution of information include structure-enabling practices which promote equal participation, such as regular calls, clear agendas established in advance of meetings, rotating presentations to give voice to lower-status members, and post-call follow ups to ensure a sense of role clarity and predictability. Furthermore, fostering knowledge repositories which seek to not only create new knowledge but record and catalogue existing knowledge helps to mitigate uneven information distribution and facilitate ongoing knowledge transfer. Managers can make a big difference in team participation by establishing dialogic practices which build rapport and trust, strengthen team communication and participation, and invite input from everyone. These practices help to bridge status differences and ensure team members are on the same page.

Differences in What Information is Salient
Computer-mediated communication (CMC) reduces nonverbal cues about interpersonal affections such as tone, warmth, and attentiveness, which contribute to message clarity and communication richness, and collaborators who use CMC often use more direct styles of communication with fewer social cues than those in face-to-face conditions. Zhao (2003) found that communicators use physical and linguistic "co-presence"- the subjective perception of closeness versus distance to make inferences about one another’s knowledge. Virtual workers are likely to have reduced contact and exposure to strong organizational structures and processes (including organizational dress, symbols, rituals, and ceremonies) that typically foster organizational identification. Difficulty in interpreting knowledge reduces experimentation, which may impact the improvisation processes vital to engendering innovation.

In face-to-face interaction, the speaker makes the importance of a message known through tone of voice, facial expression, and bodily gestures. The receiver may acknowledge understanding through exact feedback called "back-channel" communication, such as head nods, brief verbalizations like "yeah" and "okay," or smiles. These methods of emphasis and feedback ensure parties are on common ground. However, these methods are often lost in digital means of communication. For example, in an e-mail exchange, the point of the message as intended by the sender may be overlooked, misinterpreted, or given different priority. Furthermore, messages met with silence are highly ambiguous and can act as a barrier to establishing common ground. For instance, silence can be due to technical problems within the technology that mediates the parties involved in communication, or it can be due to the fact that one of the partners is out of town and cannot reply to the message. Silence can also be taken in many ways, as agreement, disagreement, passive aggression, and indifference, or in the case of dispersed groups, that the message was undelivered. Silence may lead to conflict because it blurs the notion of what is known and unknown in the group, signaling the absence of common ground. Fully implementing "back-channel" communication can be time-consuming. The lack of convenient cues in digital communication make dispersed collaboration less conducive for the establishment of mutual knowledge.

The challenges presented by electronic dependence may be mitigated through the use of technologies allowing for higher media richness, which help to provide context and nuance in virtual communications. Remote collaborations may be enhanced by co-presence design or the development of tools to enhance perceived co-presence such as online avatars or added conference call features like visual representation, turn taking, or private chat. Further, Maznevski and Chudoba (2000) found that developing predictable temporal rhythms of technology and routines of media usage improved close working relationships. Subsequent research has also highlighted the importance of co-presence for  psychological well-being and productivity.

Moreover, practices such as informal conversations among colleagues, virtual "water cooler chat," personal introductions, and discussions on trivial topics help to build connectedness and trust among virtual teams. For instance, many companies during the Covid-19 pandemic introduced 1:1 buddies, virtual coffee breaks, and digital town halls in order to increase co-presence and team identification. Team members who trust one another are more likely to ask follow-up questions for clarification, avoid snap judgments born out of miscommunication, and accept others’ advice and information. This in turn reduces the challenges associated with lost social cues during digital communication.

Differences in Speed, Timing, and Responsiveness
Speed and timing of communication is inevitably not as uniformed in digital communication as it is in face-to-face interaction. This is due to the fact that some parties have more restricted access to communication than others. The differences in relative speed and timing of feedback and conference calls are aggravated by differences in time zones, which can sharpen status differences and bolster resentment from sidelined locations. One part of the team on one side of the world may be asleep during another part’s normal workday, and the group has to work around this. These issues may be ameliorated by alternating night and morning calls for each location, having two separate meetings for different zones, or asking certain locations to participate in calls at unusual hours.

In some cases, the problems arising from differences in relative speed may be attributed instead to a lack of conscientiousness on the part of the slower partners. In fact, a fluctuating feedback cycle is more destructive than a uniformed feedback cycle of a slower pace. Further, McLarnon et al. (2019) uncovered that regular feedback exchanges demonstrated a more substantial indirect effect on team performance than scenarios where feedback was only provided post-project or obtained weekly without distribution to peers. Consequently, establishing a structured system for regular peer feedback can significantly enhance intra-team processes and overall functionality within virtual teams. Asynchronous communication tends to be more difficult to manage and requires much greater coordination than synchronous communication. As Gibson et al. (2011) found, developing consistent, time-patterned routines of communication may help to build close working relationships. Technology affordances such as a public forum where team members can post and reply to questions may also encourage timely responses and enhance ongoing knowledge transfer.

In other instances, low responsiveness stems from cultural norms which dictate how quickly workers are expected to respond and when they can be reached. For example, one study found that Western Australians may express a "can do" attitude and a direct communication style while Jamaicans tend to be more conflict-avoidant in organizational settings and have a more fluid orientation to time. These cultural differences play an important role in how power and status differences are fostered and how they impact participation in teams. Rather than "sweeping them under the rug," it is important to acknowledge differences in culture or opinion so they can be addressed through adaptation and agreeable solutions. Shared norms which bridge the differences can help resolve potential conflicts in preferences.

Virtual teams have also historically highlighted a generational gap, as many older executives and senior managers do not have as much experience with computer technology as their younger counterparts. These senior members must then exert extra energy to catch up to the younger generation and navigate new means of communicating. This difficulty is less pertinent today, as most workers have some level of fluency with digital media and firms often provide training to equalize workers’ knowledge of communication tools.

Covid-19 Pandemic
As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the virtual dimension of teamwork has gained greater prominence everywhere from social media to academic scholarship. Research on remote work has largely focused on outcomes differentiating between individuals who do and do not engage in remote work. However, as Zhang, Yu and Marin (2021) point out, during the Covid-19 pandemic, many employees were forced to work remotely. The beginning of the pandemic was marked by a rapid transition to virtual work, closures of traditional workspaces, physical distancing requirements, difficulties distributing technology and adapting to at-home work conditions, and feelings of isolation and hopelessness among newly virtual employees.

Within this, the employee satisfaction and health outcomes associated with virtual work, largely neglected by pre-pandemic literature, have quickly come to the forefront of management research. Pre-pandemic studies found that the high levels of perceived electronic dependence and lack of copresence which often accompany virtual work can negatively affect critical psychological states of experienced meaningfulness, experienced responsibility, and knowledge of results. Likewise, while a supportive communication climate predicts satisfaction and commitment and includes variables such as participation in decision-making and communication openness, these factors are more difficult to establish in virtual settings. Thus, satisfaction among the team members of a virtual team has been shown to be less positive than satisfaction among face-to-face teams. This drop in satisfaction is due in part to difficulties building trust without face-to-face communications, a necessary part of high-performing virtual teams. However, effective management and adherence to proper goal setting principles specific to the nature of work virtual teams require can lead to improved team effectiveness. If a team and its corresponding management is not prepared for the challenges of a virtual team, this will be difficult to achieve.

Recent research by Zhang, Yu, and Marin (2021: 802) discovered that workers had a generally positive attitude towards working at home, citing the availability of collaboration and communication tools, increased productivity, and remote learning and flexible work hours. Conversely, workers frequently complained that long hours of teleconferencing could be draining, individuals’ capacity to work remotely was impeded by suboptimal home office setups, information-sensitive work was susceptible to cyber-security attacks, and that decentralized set-ups harmed work team engagement. While some workers experienced improved work-life balance due to spending more time with family, others reported their work-life balance was harmed due to difficulties maintaining the boundary between family and work.

Care in Connecting
Rather than "social distancing," Gibson (2020) proposes the approach Care in Connecting, which acknowledges the need for caution in terms of physical proximity, but also promotes the urgent need for compassion that individuals and organizations provide and receive. Care in Connecting centers around three principles which counter the prejudice, isolation, and hopelessness associated with social distancing: inclusion, copresence, and vitality.

Care in Connecting creates inclusion when diverse voices are heard and incorporated online. A number of scholars addressing inclusion and intercultural collaboration have revealed the importance of recognizing the uniqueness of individual constituents while also cultivating a sense of belonging to a collectivity. Research shows that members who identify with their team are more likely to display desirable individual workplace outcomes such as helping behavior, organizational citizenship behavior, lowered social undermining and social loafing, lessened workplace bullying, and fewer turnover intentions. Organizations prioritizing inclusion during the pandemic have adopted approaches including overtime pay, unlimited sick days, paid leaves of absence, free trials of higher education to help connect job seekers to opportunities, and donated medical supplies. These inclusionary practices involve understanding employees’ unique experiences and avoiding assumptions, stereotypes, and grand generalizations.

Care in Connecting also creates co-presence, the experience of psychological proximity achievable online, to counteract feelings of isolation felt as a result of social distancing (Gibson, 2020: 166). Key to virtual team effectiveness is the team’s ability to understand which tool is most effective given the task and to selectively tailor combinations of technology to achieve copresence. Many organizations have sought to implement new practices during the pandemic to build a sense of copresence by ensuring access to technology and establishing the human element. Examples include purchasing laptops and audio equipment for workers, loaning tablets to students, implementing virtual coffee breaks or lunches, inviting workers’ children to join meetings, and promoting opportunities to connect as human beings.

Finally, Care in Connecting can enable vitality, a sense of psychological and physical energy, to address the sense of hopelessness engendered by social distancing. A significant body of research indicates that people both mimic and feel the emotions displayed by others and can receive and experience energy from interpersonal interactions. Organizations which provided examples of positivity and resilience in online interactions were able to spark positive emotional contagion and increased vitality. Many organizations communicated simple messages of care and composure, offered morning meditation sessions, allowed pets on screen for relaxation, conducted online yoga and fitness sessions, and sent out care packages to employees.

Emerging Research
There is still much unknown about the impact of Covid-19 on virtual teamwork, particularly in how employees will respond in the long-term to the blurring of public and private space and how the reorganization of reopened sites will unfold. Emerging research suggests that returning to work in the "new normal" after being out of work or teleworking to some capacity creates issues with employee focus, engagement, and mental reattachment to upcoming work. Furthermore, Shao et al. (2021) argue that workers’ newfound flexibility in working from home or at the office is impacted by stressors they encountered on the previous day. This research has implications for understanding the driving factors of daily work location choices, and how telework will unfold in a post-Covid world.

Another research concern centers on the nonnegligible chance of community transmission in the workplace which poses a threat to returning workers. While many workplaces shut down following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, others in essential industries had to remain operational, thus exposing employees to virus dangers. However, firms varied significantly in the degree to which they took action to protect their employees. Steinbach, Kautz and Korsgaard (2021) found that these firm compensation actions were associated with a growth in positive stakeholder sentiment. The reintegration of workers into face-to-face work settings has also launched academic debate on privacy and ethical concerns surrounding mandatory vaccination requirements and/or weekly testing. While our knowledge of online collaboration has yet to incorporate the dynamic urgency created by the pandemic, it is very likely that closures of traditional workplaces, physical distancing requirements, and the difficulties firms face reopening sites will fundamentally shift research on virtual work.

title: Virtual team


text:
Dupax del Norte

Dupax del Norte, officially the Municipality of Dupax del Norte (Ili na Dupax del Norte; Ili ti Dupax del Norte; Bayan ng Hilagang Dupax), is a 3rd class municipality in the province of Nueva Vizcaya, Philippines. According to the 2020 census, it has a population of 33,295 people. Dupax del Norte, situated on the south-eastern part of Nueva Vizcaya, has a total land area of 396 square kilometers. It is bounded by the town of Kasibu in the north, Alfonso Castañeda in the east, Dupax del Sur in the south, and Bambang in the west. It has wide tracts of virgin forests, rich, fertile plains and valleys with mineral deposits and has a climate suitable for agriculture.

Etymology
The origin of the name Dupax stems from the Isinay term "dopaj," denoting "to recline in utter relaxation and repose", expressing the desire of the locals to unwind fully after refurbishing their camp, enjoying their harvest, and concluding their forest hunts before returning home.

Prior to the establishment of Dupax, the site of what would be its town proper served as a camp for hunters from surrounding tribal settlements.

The area, either a plain or a valley, was located near their hunting grounds, and became their settlement as the town of Dopaj. The name later changed into Dupax when the Spaniards, upon their arrival, substituted letter "j" for "x" for convenience.

History
The town of Dupax was first discovered by Luis Pérez Dasmariñas in 1591. Eighteen years later, the mission was established by the Dominicans, but was later abandoned due to territorial disputes with the Franciscans.

Colonization seemed difficult for decades. In 1717, Fr. Alejandro Cacho came on mission to Dupax and established Christian communities. On April 22, 1731, Dupax was founded as an urban settlement by the Augustinian missionaries Fr. Nicolas Norbantes and Fr. Agustin San Juan.

In the early 18th century, Dupax was inhabited by three tribes. The Malaats from Ituy, said to be the ancestors of the Isinays, the town's first inhabitants, occupied an area known as Parai. The other two were the Caraos and the Bugcalots.

As early as 1928, during the term of Municipal President Inocencio Suzon, there were attempts to transfer the town hall to Barrio Malasin (poblacion of the present Dupax del Norte) from the poblacion (the present poblacion of Dupax del Sur). On November 28, 1931, during the incumbency of Municipal President Tranquilino Orden, the Municipal Council has approved Resolution No. 94 sponsored by Councilor Victoriano Barroga proposing the transfer of the seat of the municipal government from the old poblacion to Malasin. Congressman Leonardo B. Perez sponsored a bill on that matter. By virtue of Republic Act (RA) No. 1181 approved on June 20, 1954, the seat of government was transferred from old poblacion to Barrio Malasin, whose location is not only strategic but is beside the town's commercial center.

Dupax then was the largest municipality in Nueva Vizcaya in terms of land area prior to division into three separate ones. RA No. 6372, sponsored by Representative Benjamin Perez and Senator Leonardo Perez, was approved on August 16, 1971, dividing Dupax into two new municipalities: Dupax del Norte, which would consist the poblacion of Malasin, designated as the seat of government, eight barrios and sixteen sitios; and Dupax del Sur. As the creation of the latter was later ratified in a plebiscite, the division was only implemented through Presidential Decree No. 586 promulgated by President Ferdinand Marcos on November 20, 1974.

In 1979, through ''Batas Pambansa Blg. 27 approved by Marcos, four barangays and a sitio'' in the municipality, along with parts of Dupax del Sur, were separated to constitute into a municipality, Alfonso Castañeda.

Barangays
Dupax del Norte is politically subdivided into 15 barangays. Each barangay consists of puroks and some have sitios.

 * Belance
 * Binuangan
 * Bitnong
 * Bulala
 * Inaban
 * Ineangan
 * Lamo
 * Mabasa
 * Macabenga
 * Malasin (Poblacion)
 * Munguia
 * New Gumiad
 * Oyao
 * Parai
 * Yabbi

Mabasa
Mabasa (Iloko for "wet") is a barangay of Dupax del Norte. It was one of the oldest barrio of Dupax (when the town was not yet divided into two). Mabasa was originally called San Roque, named by the parish priest of Dupax after the saint of hunters because the place then was a thick forest where game was abundant such as deer and wild pigs.

The first settlers of San Roque were Ilokano migrants from the town of Paoay in Ilocos Norte and from Alcala and San Nicolas towns in Pangasinan. They travelled by foot and by horses and carabaos through San Nicolas, passing through Imugan, Santa Fe, Nueva Vizcaya. The migrants settled at Sitio Poonan (later called Puongan). The family of Apolonio Vadil was the first settler in Poungan. Old records from the Roman Catholic Church in Dupax del Sur showed that the daughter of Apolonio Vadil, Tomasa, was baptized on October 10, 1887.

More migrants came and settled along the Apean (Apayan) River from Puongan upstream and occupied the western part of the barrio now called Riverside East and Riverside West. The settlers found the place always flowing with abundant water coming from a spring in the eastern part of the barrio, and so they called the place "Nabasa" which means "wet" in Iloko language. It was later officially called "Mabasa" changing from the old name of "San Roque."

Inaban
The name came from the Iloko word Inabaan which means a place where there are plenty of gabi (taro) plants, locally known as “ABA”. In the early days, giant gabi plants with leaves as big as umbrellas thrived in the vicinity of this barangay.

A story goes that many years ago when the place was still thickly covered with flora and fauna, and was a favorite hunting ground, a hunter once hit a big male deer with his spear. However, the deer was not mortally wounded and it decided to attack the hunter. The man and the deer fought for about an hour but in the end, the man triumphed over the animal but the hunter was seriously wounded. Alone, he tried to find his way home. But then it began to rain, he sought shelter under the big leaves of the gabi plants. Unfortunately, the hunter died because of his wounds and days after, his remains were found under the gabi plants.

During World War II, American soldiers pronounced the word Inabaan into Inaban.

Inaban was formally created in 1963 as a barangay of Dupax (now Dupax del Norte) by virtue of Republic Act No. 3590.

Demographics
In the 2020 census, Dupax del Norte had a population of 33,295. The population density was undefined PD/km2.

Local government
Dupax del Norte, belonging to the lone congressional district of the province of Nueva Vizcaya, is governed by a mayor designated as its local chief executive and by a municipal council as its legislative body in accordance with the Local Government Code. The mayor, vice mayor, and the councilors are elected directly by the people through an election which is being held every three years.

Education
The Schools Division of Nueva Vizcaya governs the town's public education system. The division office is a field office of the DepEd in Cagayan Valley region. The office governs the public and private elementary and public and private high schools throughout the municipality.

Notable personalities

 * Carlos Padilla (September 19, 1944 – May 5, 2023), a Filipino politician who serves as governor of Nueva Vizcaya from 2016 up until his death on 2023.

Sister cities

 * San Pedro, Laguna

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Dupax del Norte


text:
Pomona, Río Negro

Pomona is a small village on the Choele Choel Island in the Avellaneda Department in the Río Negro Province, in Argentina. It was already a crossing point for the Negro River to the island in 1890, when it was known as Paso Peñalva, on the way to Choele Choel. It was formally founded in 1933 and named after the goddess Pomona, because of its gardens.

Provincial Primary School #7 is located there, containing an agrotechnic school and a municipal library. In the Pomona area, there are farms that cultivate mainly pears and apples, but also peaches and trees for wood. Its closest city is Lamarque, to which is connected by the National Route 250.

title: Pomona, Río Negro


text:
Talk:Project team

from VfD:

Useless dictdef, term should be self-explanatory -- Ferkelparade π 11:12, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * Keep. Change to cleanup. This seems to be a part of a set of human resource management articles added just recently.  KeyStroke 11:59, 2004 Oct 15 (UTC)
 * 1.8 million google hits. Expandable.  Keep and cleanup or merge and redirect somewhere. anthony (see warning) 16:47, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

A good way to expand this into an encyclopedia-worthy article is to discuss the responsibility assignment matrix and how control accounts are collected/organized into project sub-teams. --Garrybooker 13:12, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

end moved discussion

title: Talk:Project team


text:
Human eye

The human eye is an organ of the sensory nervous system that reacts to visible light and allows the use of visual information for various purposes including seeing things, keeping balance, and maintaining circadian rhythm. The eye can be considered as a living optical device. It is approximately spherical in shape, with its outer layers, such as the outermost, white part of the eye (the sclera) and one of its inner layers (the pigmented choroid) keeping the eye essentially light tight except on the eye's optic axis. In order, along the optic axis, the optical components consist of a first lens (the cornea—the clear part of the eye) that accounts for most of the optical power of the eye and accomplishes most of the focusing of light from the outside world; then an aperture (the pupil) in a diaphragm (the iris—the coloured part of the eye) that controls the amount of light entering the interior of the eye; then another lens (the crystalline lens) that accomplishes the remaining focusing of light into images; and finally a light-sensitive part of the eye (the retina), where the images fall and are processed. The retina makes a connection to the brain via the optic nerve. The remaining components of the eye keep it in its required shape, nourish and maintain it, and protect it.

Three types of cells in the retina convert light energy into electrical energy used by the nervous system: rods respond to low intensity light and contribute to perception of low-resolution, black-and-white images; cones respond to high intensity light and contribute to perception of high-resolution, coloured images; and the recently discovered photosensitive ganglion cells respond to a full range of light intensities and contribute to adjusting the amount of light reaching the retina, to regulating and suppressing the hormone melatonin, and to entraining circadian rhythm.

Structure
Humans have two eyes, situated on the left and the right of the face. The eyes sit in bony cavities called the orbits, in the skull. There are six extraocular muscles that control eye movements. The front visible part of the eye is made up of the whitish sclera, a coloured iris, and the pupil. A thin layer called the conjunctiva sits on top of this. The front part is also called the anterior segment of the eye.

The eye is not shaped like a perfect sphere; rather it is a fused two-piece unit, composed of an anterior (front) segment and the posterior (back) segment. The anterior segment is made up of the cornea, iris and lens. The cornea is transparent and more curved and is linked to the larger posterior segment, composed of the vitreous, retina, choroid and the outer white shell called the sclera. The cornea is typically about 11.5 mm in diameter, and 0.5 mm (500 μm) in thickness near its centre. The posterior chamber constitutes the remaining five-sixths; its diameter is typically about 24 mm. An area termed the limbus connects the cornea and sclera. The iris is the pigmented circular structure concentrically surrounding the centre of the eye, the pupil, which appears to be black. The size of the pupil, which controls the amount of light entering the eye, is adjusted by the iris' dilator and sphincter muscles.

Light energy enters the eye through the cornea, through the pupil and then through the lens. The lens shape is changed for near focus (accommodation) and is controlled by the ciliary muscle. Between the two lenses, there are four optical surfaces which each refract light as it travels along the optical path. One basic model describing the geometry of the optical system is the Arizona Eye Model. This model describes the accommodation of the eye geometrically. Photons of light falling on the light-sensitive cells of the retina (photoreceptor cones and rods) are converted into electrical signals that are transmitted to the brain by the optic nerve and interpreted as sight and vision.

Size
The size of the eye differs among adults by only one or 2 millimetres. The eyeball is generally less tall than it is wide. The sagittal vertical (height) of a human adult eye is approximately 23.7 mm, the transverse horizontal diameter (width) is 24.2 mm and the axial anteroposterior size (depth) averages 22.0–24.8 mm with no significant difference between sexes and age groups. Strong correlation has been found between the transverse diameter and the width of the orbit (r = 0.88). The typical adult eye has an anterior to posterior diameter of 24 mm, and a volume of 6 cm3.

The eyeball grows rapidly, increasing from about 16–17 mm diameter at birth to 22.5–23 mm by three years of age. By age 12, the eye attains its full size.

Components
The eye is made up of three coats, or layers, enclosing various anatomical structures. The outermost layer, known as the fibrous tunic, is composed of the cornea and sclera, which provide shape to the eye and support the deeper structures. The middle layer, known as the vascular tunic or uvea, consists of the choroid, ciliary body, pigmented epithelium and iris. The innermost is the retina, which gets its oxygenation from the blood vessels of the choroid (posteriorly) as well as the retinal vessels (anteriorly).

The spaces of the eye are filled with the aqueous humour anteriorly, between the cornea and lens, and the vitreous body, a jelly-like substance, behind the lens, filling the entire posterior cavity. The aqueous humour is a clear watery fluid that is contained in two areas: the anterior chamber between the cornea and the iris, and the posterior chamber between the iris and the lens. The lens is suspended to the ciliary body by the suspensory ligament (zonule of Zinn), made up of hundreds of fine transparent fibers which transmit muscular forces to change the shape of the lens for accommodation (focusing). The vitreous body is a clear substance composed of water and proteins, which give it a jelly-like and sticky composition.

Extraocular muscles
Each eye has seven extraocular muscles located in its orbit. Six of these muscles control the eye movements, the seventh controls the movement of the upper eyelid. The six muscles are four recti muscles – the lateral rectus, the medial rectus, the inferior rectus, and the superior rectus, and two oblique muscles the inferior oblique, and the superior oblique. The seventh muscle is the levator palpebrae superioris muscle. When the muscles exert different tensions, a torque is exerted on the globe that causes it to turn, in almost pure rotation, with only about one millimeter of translation. Thus, the eye can be considered as undergoing rotations about a single point in the centre of the eye.

Field of view
The approximate field of view of an individual human eye (measured from the fixation point, i.e., the point at which one's gaze is directed) varies by facial anatomy, but is typically 30° superior (up, limited by the brow), 45° nasal (limited by the nose), 70° inferior (down), and 100° temporal (towards the temple). For both eyes, combined (binocular vision) visual field is approximately 100° vertical and a maximum 190° horizontal, approximately 120° of which makes up the binocular field of view (seen by both eyes) flanked by two uniocular fields (seen by only one eye) of approximately 40 degrees. It is an area of 4.17 steradians or 13700 square degrees for binocular vision. When viewed at large angles from the side, the iris and pupil may still be visible by the viewer, indicating the person has peripheral vision possible at that angle.

About 15° temporal and 1.5° below the horizontal is the blind spot created by the optic nerve nasally, which is roughly 7.5° high and 5.5° wide.

Dynamic range
The retina has a static contrast ratio of around 100:1 (about 6.5 f-stops). As soon as the eye moves rapidly to acquire a target (saccades), it re-adjusts its exposure by adjusting the iris, which adjusts the size of the pupil. Initial dark adaptation takes place in approximately four seconds of profound, uninterrupted darkness; full adaptation through adjustments in retinal rod photoreceptors is 80% complete in thirty minutes. The process is nonlinear and multifaceted, so an interruption by light exposure requires restarting the dark adaptation process over again.The human eye can detect a luminance from 10−6 cd/m2, or one millionth (0.000001) of a candela per square meter to 108 cd/m2 or one hundred million (100,000,000) candelas per square meter. (that is it has a range of 1014, or one hundred trillion 100,000,000,000,000, about 46.5 f-stops). This range does not include looking at the midday sun (109 cd/m2) or lightning discharge.

At the low end of the range is the absolute threshold of vision for a steady light across a wide field of view, about 10−6 cd/m2 (0.000001 candela per square meter). The upper end of the range is given in terms of normal visual performance as 108 cd/m2 (100,000,000 or one hundred million candelas per square meter). The eye includes a lens similar to lenses found in optical instruments such as cameras and the same physics principles can be applied. The pupil of the human eye is its aperture; the iris is the diaphragm that serves as the aperture stop. Refraction in the cornea causes the effective aperture (the entrance pupil) to differ slightly from the physical pupil diameter. The entrance pupil is typically about 4 mm in diameter, although it can range from 2 mm in a brightly lit place to 8 mm  in the dark. The latter value decreases slowly with age; older people's eyes sometimes dilate to not more than 5–6mm in the dark, and may be as small as 1mm in the light.

Movement

The visual system in the human brain is too slow to process information if images are slipping across the retina at more than a few degrees per second. Thus, to be able to see while moving, the brain must compensate for the motion of the head by turning the eyes. Frontal-eyed animals have a small area of the retina with very high visual acuity, the fovea centralis. It covers about 2 degrees of visual angle in people. To get a clear view of the world, the brain must turn the eyes so that the image of the object of regard falls on the fovea. Any failure to make eye movements correctly can lead to serious visual degradation.

Having two eyes allows the brain to determine the depth and distance of an object, called stereovision, and gives the sense of three-dimensionality to the vision. Both eyes must point accurately enough that the object of regard falls on corresponding points of the two retinas to stimulate stereovision; otherwise, double vision might occur. Some persons with congenitally crossed eyes tend to ignore one eye's vision, thus do not suffer double vision, and do not have stereovision. The movements of the eye are controlled by six muscles attached to each eye, and allow the eye to elevate, depress, converge, diverge and roll. These muscles are both controlled voluntarily and involuntarily to track objects and correct for simultaneous head movements.

Rapid
Rapid eye movement, REM, typically refers to the sleep stage during which the most vivid dreams occur. During this stage, the eyes move rapidly.

Saccadian
Saccades are quick, simultaneous movements of both eyes in the same direction controlled by the frontal lobe of the brain.

Fixational
Even when looking intently at a single spot, the eyes drift around. This ensures that individual photosensitive cells are continually stimulated in different degrees. Without changing input, these cells would otherwise stop generating output.

Eye movements include drift, ocular tremor, and microsaccades. Some irregular drifts, movements smaller than a saccade and larger than a microsaccade, subtend up to one tenth of a degree. Researchers vary in their definition of microsaccades by amplitude. Martin Rolfs states that 'the majority of microsaccades observed in a variety of tasks have amplitudes smaller than 30 min-arc'. However, others state that the "current consensus has largely consolidated around a definition of microsaccades that includes magnitudes up to 1°."

Vestibulo-ocular
The vestibulo-ocular reflex is a reflex eye movement that stabilizes images on the retina during head movement by producing an eye movement in the direction opposite to head movement in response to neural input from the vestibular system of the inner ear, thus maintaining the image in the centre of the visual field. For example, when the head moves to the right, the eyes move to the left. This applies for head movements up and down, left and right, and tilt to the right and left, all of which give input to the ocular muscles to maintain visual stability.

Smooth pursuit
Eyes can also follow a moving object around. This tracking is less accurate than the vestibulo-ocular reflex, as it requires the brain to process incoming visual information and supply feedback. Following an object moving at constant speed is relatively easy, though the eyes will often make saccades to keep up. The smooth pursuit movement can move the eye at up to 100°/s in adult humans.

It is more difficult to visually estimate speed in low light conditions or while moving, unless there is another point of reference for determining speed.

Optokinetic
The optokinetic reflex (or optokinetic nystagmus) stabilizes the image on the retina through visual feedback. It is induced when the entire visual scene drifts across the retina, eliciting eye rotation in the same direction and at a velocity that minimizes the motion of the image on the retina. When the gaze direction deviates too far from the forward heading, a compensatory saccade is induced to reset the gaze to the centre of the visual field.

For example, when looking out of the window at a moving train, the eyes can focus on a moving train for a short moment (by stabilizing it on the retina), until the train moves out of the field of vision. At this point, the eye is moved back to the point where it first saw the train (through a saccade).

Near response
The adjustment to close-range vision involves three processes to focus an image on the retina.

Vergence movement
When a creature with binocular vision looks at an object, the eyes must rotate around a vertical axis so that the projection of the image is in the centre of the retina in both eyes. To look at a nearby object, the eyes rotate 'towards each other' (convergence), while for an object farther away they rotate 'away from each other' (divergence).

Pupil constriction
Lenses cannot refract light rays at their edges as well as closer to the centre. The image produced by any lens is therefore somewhat blurry around the edges (spherical aberration). It can be minimized by screening out peripheral light rays and looking only at the better-focused centre. In the eye, the pupil serves this purpose by constricting while the eye is focused on nearby objects. Small apertures also give an increase in depth of field, allowing a broader range of "in focus" vision. In this way the pupil has a dual purpose for near vision: to reduce spherical aberration and increase depth of field.

Lens accommodation
Changing the curvature of the lens is carried out by the ciliary muscles surrounding the lens; this process is known as "accommodation". Accommodation narrows the inner diameter of the ciliary body, which actually relaxes the fibers of the suspensory ligament attached to the periphery of the lens, and also allows the lens to relax into a more convex, or globular, shape. A more convex lens refracts light more strongly and focuses divergent light rays from near objects onto the retina, allowing closer objects to be brought into better focus.

Medicine
The human eye contains enough complexity to warrant specialized attention and care beyond the duties of a general practitioner. These specialists, or eye care professionals, serve different functions in different countries. Eye care professionals can have overlap in their patient care privileges. For example, both an ophthalmologist (M.D.) and optometrist (O.D.) are professionals who diagnoses eye disease and can prescribe lenses to correct vision. Typically, only ophthalmologists are licensed to perform surgical procedures. Ophthalmologists may also specialize within a surgical area, such as cornea, cataracts, laser, retina, or oculoplastics.

Eye care professionals include:
 * Ocularists
 * Ophthalmologists
 * Optometrists
 * Opticians
 * Orthoptists and vision therapists

Brown

In humans, brown is by far the most common eye color, with approximately 79% of people in the world having it. Brown eyes result from a relatively high concentration of melanin in the stroma of the iris, which causes light of both shorter and longer wavelengths to be absorbed.

Dark brown eyes are dominant in humans. In many parts of the world, it is nearly the only iris color present. Brown eyes are common in Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, West Asia, Oceania, Africa and the Americas.

Amber

Amber eyes are a solid color with a strong yellowish/golden and russet/coppery tint, which may be due to the yellow pigment called lipochrome (also found in green eyes). Amber eyes should not be confused with hazel eyes. Although hazel eyes may contain specks of amber or gold, they usually tend to have many other colors, including green, brown and orange. Also, hazel eyes may appear to shift in color and consist of flecks and ripples, while amber eyes are of a solid gold hue. Even though amber is similar to gold, some people have russet or copper colored amber eyes that are mistaken for hazel, though hazel tends to be duller and contains green with red/gold flecks, as mentioned above. Amber eyes may also contain amounts of very light gold-ish gray. People with that eye color are common in northern Europe, and in fewer numbers in southern Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and South America.

Hazel

Hazel eyes are due to a combination of Rayleigh scattering and a moderate amount of melanin in the iris' anterior border layer. Hazel eyes often appear to shift in color from a brown to a green. Although hazel mostly consists of brown and green, the dominant color in the eye can either be brown/gold or green. This is why hazel eyes can be mistaken as amber and vice versa. The combination can sometimes produce a multicolored iris, i.e., an eye that is light brown/amber near the pupil and charcoal or dark green on the outer part of the iris (or vice versa) when observed in sunlight.

Definitions of the eye color hazel vary: it is sometimes considered to be synonymous with light brown or gold, as in the color of a hazelnut shell.

Around 18% of the US population and 5% of the world population have hazel eyes. Hazel eyes are most common in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, with smaller amounts in southern Europe, the Middle East, and South America.

Green
Green eyes are most common in Northern, Western and Central Europe. Around 8–10% of men and 18–21% of women in Iceland and 6% of men and 17% of women in the Netherlands have green eyes. Among European Americans, green eyes are most common among those of recent Celtic and Germanic ancestry, with about 16%.

The green color is caused by the combination of: 1) an amber or light brown pigmentation in the stroma of the iris (which has a low or moderate concentration of melanin) with: 2) a blue shade created by the Rayleigh scattering of reflected light. Green eyes contain the yellowish pigment lipochrome.

Blue
Blue eyes are predominant in northern and eastern Europe, particularly around the Baltic Sea. Blue eyes are also found in southern Europe, Central Asia, South Asia, North Africa and West Asia.

Approximately 8% to 10% of the global population have blue eyes. A 2002 study found that the prevalence of blue eye color among the white population in the United States to be 33.8% for those born from 1936 through 1951.

Gray

Like blue eyes, gray eyes have a dark epithelium at the back of the iris and a relatively clear stroma at the front. One possible explanation for the difference in the appearance of gray and blue eyes is that gray eyes have larger deposits of collagen in the stroma, so that the light that is reflected from the epithelium undergoes Mie scattering (which is not strongly frequency-dependent) rather than Rayleigh scattering (in which shorter wavelengths of light are scattered more). This would be analogous to the change in the color of the sky, from the blue given by the Rayleigh scattering of sunlight by small gas molecules when the sky is clear, to the gray caused by Mie scattering of large water droplets when the sky is cloudy. Alternatively, it has been suggested that gray and blue eyes might differ in the concentration of melanin at the front of the stroma.

Gray eyes can also be found among the Algerian Shawia people of the Aurès Mountains in Northwest Africa, in the Middle East/West Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia. Under magnification, gray eyes exhibit small amounts of yellow and brown color in the iris.

Irritation
Eye irritation has been defined as "the magnitude of any stinging, scratching, burning, or other irritating sensation from the eye". It is a common problem experienced by people of all ages. Related eye symptoms and signs of irritation are discomfort, dryness, excess tearing, itchiness, grating, foreign body sensation, ocular fatigue, pain, soreness, redness, swollen eyelids, and tiredness, etc. These eye symptoms are reported with intensities from mild to severe. It has been suggested that these eye symptoms are related to different causal mechanisms, and symptoms are related to the particular ocular anatomy involved.

Several suspected causal factors in our environment have been studied so far. One hypothesis is that indoor air pollution may cause eye and airway irritation. Eye irritation depends somewhat on destabilization of the outer-eye tear film, i.e. the formation of dry spots on the cornea, resulting in ocular discomfort. Occupational factors are also likely to influence the perception of eye irritation. Some of these are lighting (glare and poor contrast), gaze position, reduced blink rate, limited number of breaks from visual tasking, and a constant combination of accommodation, musculoskeletal burden, and impairment of the visual nervous system. Another factor that may be related is work stress. In addition, psychological factors have been found in multivariate analyses to be associated with an increase in eye irritation among VDU users. Other risk factors, such as chemical toxins/irritants (e.g. amines, formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, acrolein, N-decane, VOCs, ozone, pesticides and preservatives, allergens, etc.) might cause eye irritation as well.

Certain volatile organic compounds that are both chemically reactive and airway irritants may cause eye irritation. Personal factors (e.g. use of contact lenses, eye make-up, and certain medications) may also affect destabilization of the tear film and possibly result in more eye symptoms. Nevertheless, if airborne particles alone should destabilize the tear film and cause eye irritation, their content of surface-active compounds must be high. An integrated physiological risk model with blink frequency, destabilization, and break-up of the eye tear film as inseparable phenomena may explain eye irritation among office workers in terms of occupational, climate, and eye-related physiological risk factors.

There are two major measures of eye irritation. One is blink frequency, which can be observed by human behavior. The other measures are break up time, tear flow, hyperemia (redness, swelling), tear fluid cytology, and epithelial damage (vital stains) etc., which are human beings' physiological reactions. Blink frequency is defined as the number of blinks per minute and it is associated with eye irritation. Blink frequencies are individual with mean frequencies of < 2–3 to 20–30 blinks/minute, and they depend on environmental factors including the use of contact lenses. Dehydration, mental activities, work conditions, room temperature, relative humidity, and illumination all influence blink frequency. Break-up time (BUT) is another major measure of eye irritation and tear film stability. It is defined as the time interval (in seconds) between blinking and rupture. BUT is considered to reflect the stability of the tear film as well. In normal persons, the break-up time exceeds the interval between blinks, and, therefore, the tear film is maintained. Studies have shown that blink frequency is correlated negatively with break-up time. This phenomenon indicates that perceived eye irritation is associated with an increase in blink frequency since the cornea and conjunctiva both have sensitive nerve endings that belong to the first trigeminal branch. Other evaluating methods, such as hyperemia, cytology etc. have increasingly been used to assess eye irritation.

There are other factors that are related to eye irritation as well. Three major factors that influence the most are indoor air pollution, contact lenses and gender differences. Field studies have found that the prevalence of objective eye signs is often significantly altered among office workers in comparisons with random samples of the general population. These research results might indicate that indoor air pollution has played an important role in causing eye irritation. There are more and more people wearing contact lens now and dry eyes appear to be the most common complaint among contact lens wearers. Although both contact lens wearers and spectacle wearers experience similar eye irritation symptoms, dryness, redness, and grittiness have been reported far more frequently among contact lens wearers and with greater severity than among spectacle wearers. Studies have shown that incidence of dry eyes increases with age, especially among women. Tear film stability (e.g. tear break-up time) is significantly lower among women than among men. In addition, women have a higher blink frequency while reading. Several factors may contribute to gender differences. One is the use of eye make-up. Another reason could be that the women in the reported studies have done more VDU work than the men, including lower grade work. A third often-quoted explanation is related to the age-dependent decrease of tear secretion, particularly among women after 40 years of age.

In a study conducted by UCLA, the frequency of reported symptoms in industrial buildings was investigated. The study's results were that eye irritation was the most frequent symptom in industrial building spaces, at 81%. Modern office work with use of office equipment has raised concerns about possible adverse health effects. Since the 1970s, reports have linked mucosal, skin, and general symptoms to work with self-copying paper. Emission of various particulate and volatile substances has been suggested as specific causes. These symptoms have been related to sick building syndrome (SBS), which involves symptoms such as irritation to the eyes, skin, and upper airways, headache and fatigue.

Many of the symptoms described in SBS and multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) resemble the symptoms known to be elicited by airborne irritant chemicals. A repeated measurement design was employed in the study of acute symptoms of eye and respiratory tract irritation resulting from occupational exposure to sodium borate dusts. The symptom assessment of the 79 exposed and 27 unexposed subjects comprised interviews before the shift began and then at regular hourly intervals for the next six hours of the shift, four days in a row. Exposures were monitored concurrently with a personal real time aerosol monitor. Two different exposure profiles, a daily average and short term (15 minute) average, were used in the analysis. Exposure-response relations were evaluated by linking incidence rates for each symptom with categories of exposure.

Acute incidence rates for nasal, eye, and throat irritation, and coughing and breathlessness were found to be associated with increased exposure levels of both exposure indices. Steeper exposure-response slopes were seen when short term exposure concentrations were used. Results from multivariate logistic regression analysis suggest that current smokers tended to be less sensitive to the exposure to airborne sodium borate dust.

Several actions can be taken to prevent eye irritation—
 * trying to maintain normal blinking by avoiding room temperatures that are too high; avoiding relative humidities that are too high or too low, because they reduce blink frequency or may increase water evaporation.
 * trying to maintain an intact film of tears by the following actions:
 * Blinking and short breaks may be beneficial for VDU users. Increasing these two actions might help maintain the tear film.
 * Downward gazing is recommended to reduce ocular surface area and water evaporation.
 * The distance between the VDU and keyboard should be kept as short as possible to minimize evaporation from the ocular surface area by a low direction of the gaze, and
 * Blink training can be beneficial.

In addition, other measures are proper lid hygiene, avoidance of eye rubbing, and proper use of personal products and medication. Eye make-up should be used with care.

Disease
There are many diseases, disorders, and age-related changes that may affect the eyes and surrounding structures.

As the eye ages, certain changes occur that can be attributed solely to the aging process. Most of these anatomic and physiologic processes follow a gradual decline. With aging, the quality of vision worsens due to reasons independent of diseases of the aging eye. While there are many changes of significance in the non-diseased eye, the most functionally important changes seem to be a reduction in pupil size and the loss of accommodation or focusing capability (presbyopia). The area of the pupil governs the amount of light that can reach the retina. The extent to which the pupil dilates decreases with age, leading to a substantial decrease in light received at the retina. In comparison to younger people, it is as though older persons are constantly wearing medium-density sunglasses. Therefore, for any detailed visually guided tasks on which performance varies with illumination, older persons require extra lighting. Certain ocular diseases can come from sexually transmitted infections such as herpes and genital warts. If contact between the eye and area of infection occurs, the STI can be transmitted to the eye.

With aging, a prominent white ring develops in the periphery of the cornea called arcus senilis. Aging causes laxity, downward shift of eyelid tissues and atrophy of the orbital fat. These changes contribute to the etiology of several eyelid disorders such as ectropion, entropion, dermatochalasis, and ptosis. The vitreous gel undergoes liquefaction (posterior vitreous detachment or PVD) and its opacities — visible as floaters — gradually increase in number.

Eye care professionals, including ophthalmologists and optometrists, are involved in the treatment and management of ocular and vision disorders. A Snellen chart is one type of eye chart used to measure visual acuity. At the conclusion of a complete eye examination, the eye doctor might provide the patient with an eyeglass prescription for corrective lenses. Some disorders of the eyes for which corrective lenses are prescribed include myopia (near-sightedness), hyperopia (far-sightedness), astigmatism, and presbyopia (the loss of focusing range during aging).

Macular degeneration
Macular degeneration is especially prevalent in the U.S. and affects roughly 1.75 million Americans each year. Having lower levels of lutein and zeaxanthin within the macula may be associated with an increase in the risk of age-related macular degeneration. Lutein and zeaxanthin act as antioxidants that protect the retina and macula from oxidative damage from high-energy light waves. As the light waves enter the eye, they excite electrons that can cause harm to the cells in the eye, but they can cause oxidative damage that may lead to macular degeneration or cataracts. Lutein and zeaxanthin bind to the electron free radical and are reduced rendering the electron safe. There are many ways to ensure a diet rich in lutein and zeaxanthin, the best of which is to eat dark green vegetables including kale, spinach, broccoli and turnip greens. Nutrition is an important aspect of the ability to achieve and maintain proper eye health. Lutein and zeaxanthin are two major carotenoids, found in the macula of the eye, that are being researched to identify their role in the pathogenesis of eye disorders such as age-related macular degeneration and cataracts.

Sexuality
Human eyes (particularly the iris and its color) and the area surrounding the eye (lids, lashes, brows) have long been a key component of physical attractiveness. Eye contact plays a significant role in human nonverbal communication. A prominent limbal ring (dark ring around the iris of the eye) is considered attractive. Additionally, long and full eyelashes are coveted as a sign of beauty and are considered an attractive facial feature. Pupil size has also been shown to play an influential role in attraction and nonverbal communication, with dilated (larger) pupils perceived to be more attractive. It should also be noted that dilated pupils are a response to sexual arousal and stimuli. In the Renaissance, women used the juice of the berries of the belladonna plant in eyedrops to dilate the pupils and make the eyes appear more seductive.

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