Exploring Environmental Factors in Virtual Teams Teresa Torres-Coronas Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain INTRODUCTION In today's competitive business world, global competi- tion forces companies to continually seek ways of im- proving their products/services. The hypercompetitive business environment has been the catalysts for new organizational forms--the virtual organization and its smaller version the virtual team (Jarvenpaa & Ives, 1994). The advent of new communication technolo- gies has given organizations an opportunity to bring together their distributed workforce. The creation of distributed teams makes possible the incorporation of a wide range of both individual knowledge and expertise into a collective body of knowledge needed to conduct effective group problem-solving activities. Without question, the skill most needed for effective BACKGROUND Most researchers and practitioners believe that the key to organizational success lies in developing intellectual capital and acquiring a new set of thinking: the creativ- ity to produce an idea and the innovation to translate the idea into a novel result (Roffe, 1999). Explaining the meaning of creativity is not straightforward; there are thousands of definitions of the term. So, for the purpose of this chapter we will understand creativ- ity as the shortest way to search for unconventional wisdom and to produce paradigm-breaking ideas. This unconventional wisdom through the generation and use of creative knowledge is the key to build sustainable competitive advantages (Carr, 1994). A large body of literature has focused on determining