This book focuses on virtual teams, which are fraught with cooperation problems. It offers novel insights into how team members experience and overcome these problems by empirically studying hybrid virtual teams in Shared Services Organizations. It firstly enhances the reader's understanding of contextual challenges relating to cooperation and shows how members of such teams experience faultlines through distance, disconnection through reliance on communication technology and discontinuity through temporality of team composition. Secondly, it explores how they use 22 practices to overcome the cooperation problem, which can be categorized as strategies of identity constructing, trusting and virtual peer monitoring. Lastly, the study analyzes the role of technology, demonstrating that state-of-the-art media can facilitate, but not ensure the use of these strategies and practices. As such, the book has implications for both researchers and practitioners.

This book focuses on virtual teams, which are fraught with cooperation problems. It offers novel insights into how team members experience and overcome these problems by empirically studying hybrid virtual teams in Shared Services Organizations. It firstly enhances the reader's understanding of contextual challenges relating to cooperation and shows how members of such teams experience faultlines through distance, disconnection through reliance on communication technology and discontinuity through temporality of team composition. Secondly, it explores how they use 22 practices to overcome the cooperation problem, which can be categorized as strategies of identity constructing, trusting and virtual peer monitoring. Lastly, the study analyzes the role of technology, demonstrating that state-of-the-art media can facilitate, but not ensure the use of these strategies and practices. As such, the book has implications for both researchers and practitioners.

Veranderungen sind die neue Normalitat. Um langfristig bestehen zu koennen, mussen insbesondere Dienstleistungsunternehmen, die sich bei vielen ihrer Dienstleistungsbegegnungen auf den Faktor Mensch verlassen, ihre Geschaftsablaufe radikal uberdenken und die Dienstleistungserbringungen (noch weiter) digitalisieren. Der Einsatz von Servicerobotern kann eine solche Massnahme zur Digitalisierung sein. In diesem essential wird aufgezeigt, in welchen Einsatzfeldern die Dienstleistungsunternehmen solche Roboter in die Interaktion mit den Kundinnen und Kunden integrieren koennen, fur welche Aufgaben Serviceroboter gut geeignet sind und welche Gestaltungsmerkmale zu beachten sind. Zudem werden aus einer Kunden-, Mitarbeiter- und Managementperspektive sowohl die Chancen als auch die Herausforderungen von Servicerobotern reflektiert sowie Handlungsempfehlungen abgeleitet.