Thanks for the mention of global integration and the post. NASA was a fascinating model, particularly as they had relatively unsophisticated information technology, I think the lack of visibility and share-ability of information was a major factor in the failure of many early-stage matrix organisations.

It’s quite interesting to watch the movie “Apollo 13″ as an exercise in remote and virtual team management, there is a lot of learning there.

All the risks that you identify a very real a matrix and virtual working, but there are also opportunities. For example, when employees who reported to both direct line and dotted line virtual team leaders were asked about their satisfaction with management in a UK survey, they said that they preferred their virtual leader slightly more.

The reason for this was that the virtual team leader tried harder to engage them with a wider range of strategies and approaches where is the dotted line hierarchical manager tended to fall back on traditional authority and position.

To me this is one of the advantages of virtual and matrix working, done well it requires high levels of autonomy and self-management – and this should be good for employee engagement.

Done badly, of course, it can be a disaster.

There are several videos on the people management challenges you identify on our website.