Virtual teams – just a theoretical concept or a widely used practice?

Virtual teams and management processes in them have been researched mainly theoretically. Most of these papers concentrate on presenting the definition and/or on outlining the advantages/disadvantages of virtual teams. Use of virtual teamwork is still relatively new field for academic research and even when researched empirically usually case study, interviewing or some other small sample approach is used. Current paper tries to test on a bigger sample of data, based on a questionnaire type of research, is the use of virtual teams really growing as usually stated in theoretical papers on this subject. As use of ICT is one of the main characteristics of virtual teams the study concentrates on issues related to ICT-mediated communication for co-operation purposes. The empirical results presented in the article are based on a sample of 226 Estonian service sector organizations.