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To date, efforts to understand virtual teaming have been largely anecdotal and atheoretical. Therefore, drawing from the extant research in the groups domain, we attempt to ground the definition of a virtual team in well-established group-level constructs, and design a simulation study to investigate the impact of different virtual team characteristics on team performance. Essentially, we argue that the virtual team is defined by three key characteristics—the virtual team context, the virtual team composition, and the virtual team structure. Using the VDT computational discrete event simulation model as our experimental platform, we simulated different virtual team models, and examined their impact on various team performance dimensions. We found that virtual team characteristics have different effects on different aspects of team performance. The virtual context team had a lower rework volume but higher …