Virtual organizations connect geographically dispersed employees through technology to achieve business objectives, offering benefits such as lower costs and increased employee satisfaction. However, they face challenges like lack of cohesiveness and reputational risks due to the absence of physical presence. Despite these challenges, opportunities for growth and market reach remain significant in virtual organizational structures.

1. Running Head: VIRTUAL ORGANIZATION
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VIRTUAL ORGANIZATION
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Virtual Organization
Institution
Professor
Course
Date
Virtual organizations refer to organizations whose
employees are geographically spread and connect through
phone, internet or email (Hebert, 2017). The concept of a virtual
organization utilizes technology from a management perspective
in which employees engage in different tasks to achieve the
organization’s objectives. There are various benefits associated
with virtual organizations. First, the owner of the business
incurs lower overhead costs because a virtual organization
needs no office space, furniture or paying for utilities
(Shamsuzzoha & Helo, 2017). For example, an online education
business only needs tutors and students. Secondly, employees
are more satisfied due to the comfort of working from their own

2. houses, for instance, tutors in a virtual institution can lecture
students at the comfort of their homes. Lastly, the owner of the
business can expand the business without having to worry about
moving the many employees to a larger office.
However, a virtual organization is prone to many
risks that hinder its effectiveness in terms of achieving its
objectives. One of the risks is lack of cohesiveness in the
organization. This is brought by the fact that the employees are
spread and thus difficult to call for an emergency meeting in
case an urgent need arises (Wohlers & Hertel, 2017). Secondly,
there is a risk to reputation for customers may not perceive a
virtual organization as a real company. Lastly, lack of social
interaction discourages teamwork. Despite all these, there are
various opportunities associated with virtual organizations such
as the opportunity to reach the vast majority of the customers as
well as an opportunity to change the strategy used by the
business easily and for less cost.
References
Hebert, J. L. (2017). The Identification of Leadership
Competencies within a Global Virtual Organization (Doctoral
dissertation, The Chicago School of Professional Psychology).
Shamsuzzoha, A., & Helo, P. (2017). Virtual supply chain–
event handling and risks management in collaborative
networks. International Journal of Advanced Logistics, 6(1), 1-
13.
Wohlers, C., & Hertel, G. (2017). Choosing where to work at
work–towards a theoretical model of benefits and risks of
activity-based flexible offices. Ergonomics, 60(4), 467-486.

3. Friend discussion 1 ( noura)
When independent firms join together and create a network, it is
called a virtual organization. Firms with different characters
joined temporarily to construct services or products. Virtual
organization represent a different organizational form but
cannot be considered as a firm's attribute (Cunha & Putnik,
2006). Firms in this type of organization share costs, risks, and
rewards. The main objective of the virtual enterprise is to offer
inventive and top quality products or services continuously as
per the demands of consumers. In a virtual organization, teams
may include consumers, suppliers, management, government,
and employees working together to reach common goals. For a
virtual organization, working teams are working together until
the product or services designed and implemented successfully
(Putnik, 2005). There are many benefits of the virtual
organization, we mentioned the most effective of them. Low
operating cost is one of the benefits of a virtual organization.
We know in this type of organization different types of firms
joined together for better outcomes so, cost of every firm
decreases due to increasing of investment. overhead cost is
lower than an individual organization if they want to implement
the same project. In a virtual organization, there is a lack of
bonding between employees, employees are working together
until the project successfully designed and implemented.
Different types of firms work together, for this reason, the
communication between them cannot be established properly

4. and it also effective in the outcomes of the project. By working
with unknown groups, an organization should face reputational
risk when one of them working inaccurately. An inaccurate
work effect badly in the ultimate outcomes and all of the firms
of a virtual organization are responsible for that imperfection.
Hire the best available talent is one of the most effective
opportunities for the virtual organization. By working with
multi-culture teams, an organization can get an opportunity to
easily familiarize and understand the trends and demands.
As an example, an online shopping site wants to launch various
types of products a virtual organization created for this. There
is a different type of company to sell their products on this site.
The main advantage will be the number of footfall increase and
increase the number of the buyer. Risk occurs when any of the
company use to sell the bad quality of the product and a bad
impact created in consumers. After that consumers provide
negative feedback which badly effects in the business of the
organization. They have the opportunity to grow their business
by creating a virtual organization with established companies.
Friend discussion 2 ( Baraa )
Benefits:
The primary benefit of a virtual organization is that it can unite
highly qualified people without location restrictions. Virtual
Organizations make it possible to satisfy constantly changing
customer and market requirements in a competitive manner. The
access to market increases.
1: It becomes possible to provide services precisely tailored to a
specific customer need.
2: An ability to participate in Virtual Organizations increases
the total service range a company can offer to its customers.
3: Participation in Virtual Organizations increases the total

5. number of end-customers a company can reach indirectly via its
partners.
4: A particular organization can both “multiply itself” virtually
by participating in several Virtual Organizations and initiate a
VO that will be constituted from different parties. This creates
the possibility for coexistence of the opposites in one
organization.
5: By participation in a Virtual Organization the concept-to-
cash time is reduced.
It is of course possible for only a part of an organization to
become virtual. In that case organizations can gradually evolve
from real to virtual.
Risks:
The most challenging part of Virtual Organizations is the
establishment and maintenance of trust. Trust needs to be
established at several levels:
· Authentication
· Policy Based Management
· Business Rules.
Trust is based on rational calculations. Trust is established by
the means of digital identities, certification, access control
mechanisms, authentication, secure connection, reputation and
inspection of the parties.
The main challenges related to the trust establishment are:
· Each party has its own policies on access control and
conditions of use.
· The allocation of resources is often dynamic since the
structure of Virtual Organizations may change dynamically.
· Parties may be located in different countries under different
jurisdictions and, as a consequence, adhere to different legal
and business requirements.
· Since Virtual Organizations rely on IT, exposure to fraud or
misuse of technology is a major concern.
· Security systems of Virtual Organization partners must be
mutually trusted. This brings up the challenge to come up with

6. an effective and flexible security system.
· Contract management needs to be effective in order to be able
to quickly reconfigure in Virtual Organizations. Services for
management of electronic contracts must be trusted.
· Service level agreement (SLA) monitoring is important to
ensure that parties perform according to contracts.
· Parties have to provide access to their services and resources,
as specified in agreements.
· It is a challenging task to choose between different potential
vendors/parties. Sometimes options are closed and only few
players are available on the market. In these cases a Virtual
Organization initiator is to choose whoever is available.
· It may happen that dispersed project members are incapable of
communicating
Opportunities:
The virtual teams offer the organizations an opportunity to hire
the best available talent from every corner of the world. Multi-
cultural teams are also supposed to cater to global clients in a
better way as they can understand their demands easily. Since,
the employees can work in their comfort zone, this acts as a
mutual benefit for both the organization as well as employees.
The work timings are rarely defined under virtual set-ups and
all these factors enhance the availability of female workforce
that is often found missing in the traditional teams. Researches
show females can prove to be better leaders and create a more
harmonious work environment (Zenger Folkman Inc, 2011 cited
in HBR, 2012). Also, it is proved that companies do better
corporate social responsibility when there are a higher
proportion of females in the workforce (India CSR, 2011). So,
virtual organizations avail these benefits apart from an
opportunity for global knowledge transfer and learning for its
members. The organizations can save a lot on office
infrastructure as there is absolutely no need for a huge office
space. Apart from infrastructure, the companies also save on
reimbursing any commuting expenses to their employees.
Example:

7. 1: A small software company wants to bid for a new contract,
which is beyond its scope of the resources. This company forms
a Virtual Organization with other similar small companies and
by doing that it is suddenly able to compete with larger
corporations to gain the contract.
2: A business traveller comes to a foreign country and wants to
do something in the evening. He/she goes to a WLAN-equipped
café and requests a multi-media city guide to be shown using
his personal computer and the café’s facilities. This service can
only be provided if the café, content providers, the user’s home
service provider, and other network operators have previously
formed a VO.
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