As the ubiquity of virtual work—and particularly virtual project teams—increases in the professional environment, management and other professional programs are increasingly teaching students skills related to virtual work. One of the most common forms of teaching virtual work skills is a virtual team project, in which students collaborate with each other at a distance (and sometimes between multiple institutions) to accomplish a shared task. These projects differ from most management topics in their technology requirements. In this comparative review, we describe the features and trade-offs inherent in some of the asynchronous and synchronous communication technology tools commonly used to run virtual team projects.

Purpose This paper examines how evidence based management (EBM) can help managers build more flexible organizations. In the context of this article, we define the need to build for this capacity around the challenge of “ambidexterity”, or the need for companies to continue operations while also allowing for innovation. We present a framework to help managers create strategies that help them build ambidexterity in their organizations, whether they operate in highly regulated, compliance driven or un-regulated, non-compliance climates. Design/methodology/approach This paper identifies four organizational design strategies each of which represents a different leadership and organization consideration that may focus on how evidence based management practices are linked to competency building (i.e., exploitation), the need innovation, or an equal balance between the two (i.e., ambidexterity). Findings Our findings reveal that an organization’s use of data given these four strategic orientations reflect different uses of data (verifiability and codification concerns) and ways of embedding compliance and ambidexterity (exploitation vs. exploration) considerations. Practical implications These four strategies help managers expose biases in their current decision-making practices, and how they subsequently may affect lifecycle, change management, and data practice in ambidexterity development. Originality/value While EBM acknowledges the importance of utilizing evidence, it remains limited toward understanding how it might be used to build for ambidexterity in organizations.

Several barriers, grounded in differences in knowledge, training, skills, and awareness, interfere with academics communicating successfully with practitioners about evidence. We describe several ways to reduce such barriers. These include providing sources that are trustworthy and accessible to managers; developing managerial skill in diagnosis; carrying out evidence-based practice; and communicating evidence in ways that are attractive, understandable, memorable, and actionable through channels that are likely to be noticed. We suggest several means for accomplishing each of these.

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Institutionalization occurs when organizations adopt policies and practices in an attempt to increase their legitimacy and competitive position. This process assumes that an organization's formal policies (macro-level) are translated into organizational practices (micro-level). This translation, however, can fail to occur, resulting in organizational decoupling and de-institutionalization. Drawing on an institutionalization typology based on different levels of legitimacy (macro) and taken-for-grantedness (micro), the article draws on data from an assessment of the United Nations Global Compact LEAD initiative, assessing the extent to which this initiative is being institutionalized in the member firms and examining the implications for the LEAD initiative and our thinking about institutionalization. Nora Junaid is a doctoral candidate at