This paper introduces a study about managing the performance of virtual teams using intelligent agents. Through a review of previous research, the paper starts by contextually situating this investigation and then clarifies the research assumptions and main concepts. The research problem is then defined: How to improve the performance of a virtual team with intelligent agents? We then follow a methodology to help providing some answers to our research problem. As a first result, we present and formally define a team performance model mediated by agents, the aTeam model. The practical result of this research is to introduce a model and a methodology that can be used to assess how a group of people is potentially going to interact as a virtual team, and by extension, how they will work as a team, and how well they are likely to perform. KEYWORDS Virtual Team Teamwork Performance Agents