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