Virtual Teams

1) Greater flexibility 2) Saves time and cost 3) encourages appreciation of diversity

Benefits

Involves monitoring team process toward goals, systems monitoring, team monitoring and backup behavior and coordination.

Action Process

Traditional team research emphasizes that successful co-located teams are able to communicate effectively and share information crucial to project completion in a timely manner.

Allen, 1977

Coordination is the degree of functional articulation and unity of effort between different organizational parts and the extent to which the work activities of team members are logically consistent and coherent.

Cheng, 1983

In their study they found that virtual teams generate more ideas than traditional teams.

Chidambaram & Bostrom,1993

Goals, people, technology

Core features

Persons are located all over the world, their language skills will differ and there will be cultural differences so members have to be cognizant of these factors.

Cultural Distribution

1) Geographical 2) Temporal 3) Cultural 4) Organizational

Dimensions

1) loss of social contact 2) feelings of isolation 3) lack of trust

Drawbacks

Virtual teams are located across the globe, while traditional team members interact face to face.

Geographical Distribution

Clear, precise and mutually agreed upon goals are the glue that holds a team together.

Goals

Includes conflict management, motivation and confidence building and affect management.

Interpersonal Process

As the life of many virtual teams is relatively limited, trust must quickly develop.

Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999

Research on trust in the virtual environment has found that short-lived teams are in fact able to develop high trust but they do so by following a swift trust model rather than the traditional model of trust development.

Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999

Virtual teams that exhibit high trusting behaviors experience significant social communication as well as predictable communication patterns, substantial feedback, positive leadership, enthusiasm and the ability to cope with technical uncertainty

Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999

The extent to which feedback is provided on a regular basis, improves communication effectiveness leading to higher trust and improving team performance

Jarvenpaa et al, 1998

Unpredictable communication patterns have been found to undermine the coordination and success of virtual teams.

Johansson et al, 1999

Coordination has been linked to virtual team performance, but early work has also highlighted the significant difficulties that virtual teams face as they attempt to coordinate across time zones, cultural divides and divergent mental models.

Johansson et al, 1999 & Sarker & Sahay, 2002

Research on the relationship between team members' training and team performance early results suggest that consistent training among all team members improve team performance

Kaiser et Al, 2000

Studies contributed the successful performance of virtual teams to training, strategy, developing shared language, team cohesiveness, communication, coordination and commitment of the team and collaborative conflict behavior.

Kaiser et al, 2000 & Tan et al, 2000

Few empirical studies have investigated leadership effectiveness and important virtual team leader characteristics.

Kokko and colleagues, 2006

Communication has been the focus of substantial research and it has been found that traditional teams tend to communicate more effectively than their virtual counterparts.

McDonough et Al 2001

Others found that virtual teams could not outperform traditional teams.

McDonough et al, 2001

Trust development in virtual teams is a significant challenge because it is difficult to assess teammates' trustworthiness without ever having met.

McDonough et al, 2001

When compared to traditional team members, virtual team members generally report weaker relational links to teammates.

McDonough et al, 2001

The model suggest that when they don't have enough time to slowly build trust, team members assume that others are trustworthy and begin working as if trust were already in place while seeking confirming or disconfirming evidence throughout the duration of the project.

Meyerson et al, 1996

Everyone needs to be autonomous and self-reliant while simultaneously working collaborative with others.

People

When team formulates strategy, specify goals and analyze mission formulation and planning

Planning Process

If it is feasible for team members to physically meet, these early meetings should focus on relationship building because these early experiences strengthen the so CEO emotional development of the team and foster later success by improving performance and enhancing learning.

Robey et al 2000 & Kaiser et al 2000

It is important for virtual teams to have face to face meetings where they can focus on relationship building which would strengthen the so CEO emotional development of the team and foster later success by improving performance and enhancing learning.

Robey et al 2000 & Kaiser et al 2000

Communication among virtual team members early in the project has been found to foster the ability to form closer interpersonal relationships between members.

Robey et al, 2000

Cultural and language difference are common in global virtual teams but subtler differences among team members from different regions of the same country may be enough to negatively impact a virtual team.

Robey et al, 2000

Efforts to minimize cultural barriers have also been shown to improve coordination of team members.

Robey et al, 2000

Points out that virtual teams characterized by diverse technology skills may experience conflict when members are unable to resolve differences and compromise on the use of a specific skill during task completion ( e.g using oracle and access) which can affect their performance in terms of completing the task on time.

Sarker & Sahay, 2002

Found collaboration norms need to develop for the team to be able to consistently and coherently meld team members' contributions.

Sarker et al, 2001

Trust development is deemed crucial for the successful completion of virtual team projects.

Sarker et al, 2001

Greater effectiveness for virtual teams

Sharda et al,1988

Nonverbal communication is an important component of team communication and is usually missing in virtual teams

Sproull & Kiesler, 1991

Argues that even though there are challenges to effective coordination in virtual teams methods such as the development of coordination protocol, communication interventions and periodic meetings have been used with promising results.

Tan et al, 2000

Early and uniform training has also been found to foster cohesiveness, trust, teamwork, commitment to team goals, individual satisfaction and higher perceived decision quality.

Tan et al, 2000

1) Planning 2) Action 3) Interpersonal

Team Processes

Virtual teams can function with only simple system but frequently use more elaborate information technology

Technology

Communication tools used by virtual teams are not synchronized, member reply when their schedule permits while traditional team members have the benefit of instant communication.

Temporal Distribution

A geographically dispersed group of individuals with complementary skills committed to a common purpose and goals with accountability and rely on various telecommunications and information technologies to collaborate to accomplish goals.

Virtual Team