and a constructive team climate has to be maintained using performance management strategies. These comprehensive management strategies arise from the agreed upon difficulty of working in virtual teams. Research shows that constructs and expectations of team membership, leadership, goal setting, social loafing and conflict differ in cultural groups and therefore affects team performance a lot. In early team formation process, one thing to agree on within a team is the meaning of leadership and role differentiation for the team leader and other team members. To apply this, the leader must show active leadership to create a shared conceptualization of team meaning, its focus and function. The following discussion is again restricted to issues on which empirical results are already available. These issues are leadership, communication within virtual teams, team members' motivation, and knowledge management. Leadership is a central challenge in virtual teams. Particularly, all kinds of direct control are 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 again more difficult to achieve in virtual teams. Next, empirical results on three leadership approaches are summarized that differ in the degree of autonomy of the team members: Electronic monitoring as an attempt to realize directive leadership over distance, management by objectives (MBO) as an example for delegative leadership principles, and self-managing teams as an example for rather autonomous teamwork. One way to maintain control over a virtual team is through motivators and incentives. Both are common techniques implemented by managers for collocated teams, but with slight adjustments they can be used effectively for virtual teams as well. A commonly held belief is that working online, is not particularly important or impactful. This belief can be changed by notifying employees that their work is being sent to the managers. This attaches the importance of career prospects to the work, and makes it more meaningful for the workers. Communication processes are perhaps the most frequently investigated variables relevant for the regulation of virtual teamwork. By definition, communication in virtual teams is predominantly based on electronic media such as e-mail, telephone, video-conference, etc. The main concern here is that electronic media reduce the richness of information