Amidst the sweeping tide of digitalization and intelligentization, the form and operation of teams are undergoing a quiet revolution. Traditional teams rely on fixed office spaces, clear hierarchical divisions of labor, and face-to-face communication - the foundations of conventional teams are crumbling. In their place are new organizations with members spread across various locations, participating in multiple projects simultaneously, and collaborating with artificial intelligence.
This is not science fiction, but a true reflection of the daily operations of businesses today. Digital teams, this new organizational form, are redefining the meaning of "team" with their characteristics of being borderless, having multiple identities, being highly mobile, virtualized, and involving human-machine collaboration.
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Image source: © Envato Elements |
For managers, how do they lead an "invisible" team? How do they trust an algorithmic "colleague"? How do they maintain cohesion and efficiency in this fluid environment?
HU Qiongjing, associate professor at the School of Management of Zhejiang University, CHEN Yijun, a doctoral student in Business Administration in 2024, and WEI Junjie, an alumnus of the School of Management of Zhejiang University and Assistant Professor at the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences of Tilburg University, published an article in Tsinghua Management Review responding to these issues.
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HU Qiongjing | 胡琼晶 School of Management, Zhejiang University |
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Academic Background: Associate Professor at the ZJUSOM. His research focuses on leadership behavior, status, and team structure within a team context, revealing the interaction patterns of team members and providing multifaceted suggestions for building high-performing teams. You can learn more about Associate Prof. HU Qiongjing‘s academic background here |
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CHEN Yijun | 陈一骏 School of Management, Zhejiang University |
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Academic Background: Doctoral candidate in the Department of Leadership and Organizational Management, ZJUSOM. His research interests include employee cognition and behavioral responses in digital and intelligent contexts, new employee socialization, incentive and reward mechanisms.
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WEI Junjie | 魏俊杰 School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Tilburg University |
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Academic Background: Ph.D. candidate (2017 cohort) in Business Administration from the ZJUSOM and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Organizational Science at the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Tilburg University. His research mainly covers areas such as mobile teams, multi-team member identities, and platform gig work. You can learn more about Dr. WEI Junjie‘s academic background here |
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01 | What Is a Digital Team? Five Key Characteristics Defining a New Organizational Form |
A digital team is not simply a matter of moving a traditional team online; rather, it represents a systematic restructuring of organizational structure and operational logic under the deep empowerment of digital technology. Research has identified five key characteristics of digital teams.
01 | Boundaryless
Digital teams have broken down departmental, job, and even organizational boundaries, enabling flexible collaboration across levels and functions. Digital collaboration platforms such as DingTalk and Lark have freed resource integration from physical limitations.
02 | Multiple team identities
Employees are no longer tied to a single team and can participate in multiple projects simultaneously, switching roles as needed. Personal Kanban boards and task prioritization have become the new norm.
03 | Fluidity
The team‘s personnel structure is dynamically adjusted according to task requirements, forming a "plug-and-play" organizational structure. Crowdsourcing-driven temporary project teams have become a typical practice.
04 | Virtuality
Remote online collaboration has become mainstream, giving rise to cross-regional, short-cycle "flash teams" that enable efficient allocation of global talent.
05 | Human-machine collaboration
AI is evolving from a tool into a "quasi-team member," deeply involved in decision-making and task execution, enhancing the team‘s cognitive abilities and resilience.
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Image source: ©千库网 |
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02 | Mechanisms of Efficient Operation: The Operational System of a Digital Team |
To gain a deeper understanding of the operational mechanism of digital teams, the study adopted the classic I-M-O (Input-Process-Output) framework and found that the outstanding effectiveness of digital teams stems from their systematic innovation in three key areas.
01 | From static job assignment to intelligent team formation
During the team building phase, digital collaboration platforms have shifted from "static job allocation" to "dynamic matching." Based on employee skill tags and task requirements, the platform recommends the optimal personnel combination in real time. Platforms like DingTalk and Lark, acting as "intelligent team-building engines," can recommend the optimal personnel combination in real time based on task requirements and employee skill tags, achieving precise "task-finding-person" configuration. Crowdsourcing platforms support the flexible formation of "flash teams," automatically completing team configuration and task decomposition using intelligent algorithms.
More noteworthy is that AI is evolving from an auxiliary tool into a "team member." After DingTalk integrated with DeepSeek and Slack integrated AI robots, artificial intelligence began to provide substantial support in areas such as knowledge management and task planning, becoming a true contributor to collaboration.
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Image source: ©千库网 |
02 | From human-to-human collaboration to deep human-machine collaboration
In the collaborative process, digital technologies have elevated interactive efficiency to a whole new level. Tools such as audio and video conferencing and collaborative whiteboards act as connectors within teams, making real-time collaboration across time zones and geographical locations seamless and natural. Meanwhile, the deep integration of intelligent technologies allows AI to play multiple key roles: it can not only automatically identify scheduling conflicts, warn of task risks, and generate meeting minutes to improve team efficiency, but also provide managers with in-depth insights by analyzing team communication content to identify discussion focus, diversity of viewpoints, and even potential conflicts.
Cutting-edge research in academia has gone even further, beginning to use technological means to monitor "team interactive memory systems" - that is, knowledge distribution maps of "who knows what" within a team. This provides managers with an unprecedented perspective for optimizing team knowledge sharing and collaborative cognition.
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03 | From finish line assessment to continuous evolution
In terms of output, the management focus of digital teams has shifted from traditional result acceptance to full-process performance tracking and intelligent feedback. Collaborative platforms automatically record data across the entire process, including communication, documents, and task progress, generating dynamic and comprehensive performance profiles that allow for more precise and timely management intervention. Simultaneously, team assistants based on large language models can proactively generate risk lists and improvement suggestions, driving management from "reactive firefighting" to "proactive insight."
Ultimately, all work records can be automatically transformed into structured knowledge assets with the help of AI and stored in the organization‘s knowledge base. This means that the experience gained from each project will not be wasted, but will become intellectual nourishment for the next project.
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03 | Management Capabilities for Digital Teams: Four Critical Dimensions |
While digital teams demonstrate significant advantages in efficiency and innovation, this new organizational form also brings four major management challenges that traditional teams have never experienced.
First, there‘s the pervasive dilemma of "identity." When employees juggle multiple projects and collaborate with colleagues scattered across different locations, they often struggle with questions like "Who is part of our team?" and "What is my place in the team?" Fragmented task assignments and decentralized collaboration models make establishing a stable sense of belonging exceptionally difficult.
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This leads to the challenge of building trust. In the virtual space where face-to-face communication is lacking, team members find it difficult to quickly assess each other‘s reliability and professional competence through brief text exchanges. More complexly, in the "human-AI-human" collaborative chain, people naturally harbor doubts about the judgment logic and behavioral motivations of artificial intelligence, which introduces uncertainty into human-machine collaboration.
A deeper challenge concerns the team‘s psychological well-being. When every keystroke and every online interaction is recorded and converted into data by the system, members inevitably become more cautious when expressing immature ideas or raising objections. Sparks of innovation often require a safe space for trial and error, but purely text-based communication, lacking nonverbal cues such as tone and facial expressions, further increases the risk of misunderstanding and inhibits the desire for free expression.
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Image source: ©千库网 |
Furthermore, the cognitive risks of artificial intelligence are also a hidden challenge. The "illusion" problem of generative AI - that is, providing seemingly reasonable but actually false answers - can mislead team decisions. If the team lacks sufficient skepticism and verification mechanisms, this seemingly credible misinformation can quietly infiltrate the decision-making process and disrupt the team‘s original judgment logic.
These four challenges are interconnected and together constitute a new obstacle that digital team management must overcome.
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04 | Management Breakthrough: Four Capabilities for Digital Teams |
To address these challenges, the study proposes specific management strategies and implementation paths from four key dimensions to help team managers respond effectively.
01 | Strengthening the foundation of capabilities: Enhance members‘ digital literacy
In the context of rapid technological advancements, the efficient operation of digital teams relies on members‘ proficiency in digital tools and a deep understanding of artificial intelligence. Enterprises should promote "digital literacy" through institutionalized means, regularly conduct training sessions on digital tools and AI knowledge, establish internal knowledge-sharing platforms, and encourage members to share their digital collaboration experiences. Collaborating with external organizations to introduce cutting-edge courses will also help maintain the team‘s technological competitiveness.
02 | Optimize task collaboration: Promote a shared leadership model
The high mobility and virtual nature of digital teams necessitate a shift in leadership models towards greater decentralization. Shared leadership allows each member to autonomously assume leadership responsibilities based on their area of expertise and project phase, fostering initiative and accountability. By clearly defining task assignments and responsibilities through digital platforms and rotating project leaders periodically, each member has the opportunity to develop leadership skills, thereby improving overall team adaptability and collaborative efficiency.
03 | Strengthening team relationships: Improve trust and psychological safety mechanisms
Trust and psychological safety are key elements in ensuring the quality of digital team collaboration. In virtual environments, the traditional "face-to-face familiarity" is replaced by instant messaging and asynchronous interaction. The stability of team relationships and the maintenance of trust and psychological safety increasingly rely on institutional design and technological support. Therefore, managers should focus on improving the transparency and frequency of team communication, holding regular video conferences and online interactive activities to increase the experience of "face-to-face" alternatives. At the same time, they should foster a culture of safe expression of opinions, establish anonymous feedback channels, and ensure that members can freely express their ideas and feel at ease.
04 | Strengthening intelligent governance: Optimize AI application strategies
While the application of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in digital teams has significantly improved collaboration efficiency, it also raises the risk of information distortion. Therefore, managers should clearly define the boundaries of AI applications, enhance the team‘s ability to monitor and correct AI technologies, and establish a more robust intelligent governance mechanism. For example, this includes developing AI application standards and guidelines, clearly defining usage scenarios, decision-making authority, and accountability; and establishing dual or multiple verification mechanisms to prevent AI illusions from influencing decision-making. Furthermore, it is essential to encourage team members to maintain critical thinking, proactively question and verify AI-generated information, and provide necessary training to improve their understanding of AI‘s limitations.
The core issue of digital team management lies not in the technology itself, but in how to make technology serve the growth of people and the development of the organization. A truly efficient digital team is not only a product of technological empowerment, but also a manifestation of humanistic care - establishing identity in borderless collaboration, building a solid foundation of trust in virtual interaction, and maintaining critical thinking in human-machine coexistence.
- We thank Associate Prof. HU Qiongjing and the research team for their valuable contribution to advancing the understanding of how digitalization reshapes team management and enables more effective leadership of “invisible” teams in the digital age.
- You can read the original article in Chinese here
