From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A virtual team (also known as a geographically dispersed team, distributed team, or remote team) usually refers to a group of individuals who work together from different geographic locations and rely on communication technology such as email, instant messaging, and video or voice conferencing services in order to collaborate. The term can also refer to groups or teams that work together asynchronously or across organizational levels.
Powell, Piccoli and Ives (2004) define virtual teams as "groups of
geographically, organizationally and/or time dispersed workers brought
together by information and telecommunication technologies to accomplish
one or more organizational tasks."
As documented by Gibson (2020), virtual teams grew in importance and
number during 2000-2020, particularly in light of the 2020 Covid-19
pandemic which forced many workers to collaborate remotely with each
other as they worked from home.
As the proliferation of fiber optic technology has significantly increased the scope of off-site communication,
there has been a tremendous increase in both the use of virtual teams
and scholarly attention devoted to understanding how to make virtual
teams more effective (see Stanko & Gibson, 2009; Hertel, Geister & Konradt, 2005; and Martins, Gilson & Maaynard, 2004
for reviews). When utilized successfully, virtual teams allow companies
to procure the best expertise without geographical restrictions, to integrate information, knowledge, and resources from a broad variety of contexts within the same team, and to acquire and apply knowledge to critical tasks in global firms. According to Hambley, O'Neil, & Kline (2007), "virtual teams
require new ways of working across boundaries through systems,
processes, technology, and people, which requires effective leadership."
Such work often involves learning processes such as integrating and
sharing different location-specific knowledge and practices, which must
work in concert for the multi-unit firm to be aligned. Yet, teams with a high degree of “virtuality” are not without their challenges, and when managed poorly, they often underperform face-to-face (FTF) teams.
In light of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, many industries
experienced a rapid and overnight transition to virtual work as a result
of “social distancing.”
However, some scholars have argued the phrase “social distancing” in
reference to the practice of physical distancing between colleagues may
have dangerous connotations, potentially increasing prejudice based on
age or ethnicity, isolation due to limited options for interpersonal
contact, and hopelessness, given the focus on prohibitions rather than
solutions.
Today, most work teams have become virtual to some degree, though the
literature has yet to incorporate the dynamic urgency of the pandemic
and the impacts of rapid-fire learning of new technology and
communication skills.
Origins
The
acceleration of digital technologies has allowed common, even
synchronous activities to be distributed across employees at remote
locations. These decentralized work arrangements were first named telework
in the 1970s, defined as “work carried out in a location remote from
the central offices or production facilities, where the worker has no
personal contact with coworkers but is able to communicate with them
electronically." Typically, the remote location is the home, though telework centers and remote offices are alternative locations.
Since the introduction of home computers in the 1980s and laptops and
mobile phones in the 1990s, increasing numbers of office workers have
become able to work from different locations. Moreover, the shift from manufacturing to an information economy has expanded the number of jobs amenable to remote work. Telecommuting is referred to as telework, remote work, distributed work, virtual work, flexible work, flexplace, and distance work, among other labels.
Investigations of such flexible work locations began in earnest over 30 years ago (see Ramsower, 1983). Distributed work and telecommuting have become widespread practices, growing steadily in the United States and abroad.
A 2002 study by the Gartner Group indicated that more than 60% of
professional American employees worked in teams characterized by
virtuality, and by 2012, nearly 3.3 million American workers telecommuted for at least half of the time.
Globally, an international survey of 254 senior-level executives
revealed that staff in two thirds of their global firms were involved in
distributed work.
Early research heralded virtual teams as a promising design for
integrating firms and taking maximum advantage of innovation-creating
capabilities.
They were likewise touted as means to permit flexibility in the “where”
of tasks, to allow workers to meet household needs, and to enable
organizations to adapt work arrangements to changing environments and
labor needs.
According to Gibson and Gibbs (2006: 453), the term “virtual”
represents a wide variety of teams that are at least to some extent
geographically dispersed (consisting of members spread across more than
one location), mediated by technology (communicating using electronic
tools such as e-mail or instant messaging), structurally dynamic (in
which change occurs frequently among members, their roles, and
relationships to each other), or nationally diverse (consisting of
members with more than one national background).
Much of the literature has focused on the challenges of virtual teams,
while few have identified their assets and benefits, identifying
strategies by which to increase team effectiveness and satisfaction.
As technological ability and industry contexts are rapidly and
continuously changing, virtual work represents a promising avenue of
research as an ever-evolving, fundamental shift in how organizations
have historically done business.
Defining Features
The
four defining features of a virtual team – geographic dispersion,
electronic dependence, national diversity, and dynamic structure – have
unique effects and should be considered independently.
For example, although electronic dependence sometimes coincides with
geographic dispersion, this is not always the case; teams in the same
office may use e-mail to avoid the trip up to another floor, and teams
in different countries may prefer to meet face-to-face infrequently
rather than use video calls. As such, there is conceptual agreement that
virtuality is a multidimensional higher-order construct. Rather than being dichotomous “on-off” conditions, these four features
of virtuality each represent a continuum, and the degree of difference
influences the strength of its effects. These four factors will be explored in further detail below.
Geographic dispersion refers to the degree of physical distance
between team colleagues. A team that spans multiple continents is more
dispersed than one whose participants are located in the same city, and
this degree of dispersion in turn modulates the severity of outcomes.
Electronic dependence refers to the degree of reliance on electronic tools such as e-mail or instant messaging for communications.
National diversity refers to the number of different
nationalities represented on the team. Virtual teams may consist of
members of a single nationality (e.g. a software team split between the
American East and West Coasts, but who all share American nationality or
a global team of Germans who work in different countries, but all share
German nationality).
Colleagues from different nations may bring different cultural values,
mindsets, allegiances, and communication styles to the team.
Dynamic structure/membership refers to how often members leave and join the team, and to how stable or changeable members’ roles are. Rather than having stable membership, many virtual teams are short-term and project-based, or involve frequent member turnover.
Framework for Processes
Overview
According
to Gibson and Cohen (2003), the effectiveness of virtual teams is a
function of enabling conditions, which are created and supported by
managers and leaders, and do not work independently but rather in
concert with one another through multiple performance strategies.
Multiple design and implementation factors help to create the
conditions that support virtual team effectiveness. These factors
include organizational context, team design, technology use, team member
characteristics, and work and team processes. Virtuality amplifies the
challenges faced by teams. As teams become more virtual, they confront
greater uncertainty and complexity, increasing the difficulty of the
information processing and sensemaking tasks they face. Likewise, the
greater the number and depth of differences that need to be managed in
virtual teams, the greater the barriers to effectiveness. These teams
must be designed, supported, and led effectively to be successful. When
they are well supported, virtual teams enable the best talent
irrespective of location, capitalize on each organization’s unique
competencies, and bring together people from different perspectives and
knowledge bases, leading to higher levels of innovation. This orienting
framework is explained in more detail below.
Enabling Conditions
For
virtual teams to perform well, three enabling conditions must be
established: (1) shared understanding about the team’s goals, tasks,
work processes, and member characteristics; (2) integration or
coordination across key organizational systems and structures; and (3)
mutual trust in the team.
Shared understanding is the degree of cognitive overlap
and commonality in beliefs, expectations, and perceptions about a given
target. Virtual teams need to develop a shared understanding about their
goals, their tasks, how to achieve them, and what each team member
brings to the team.
Integration is the process of establishing ways in which
the parts can work together to create value, develop products, or
deliver services.
The parts of the organization represented by virtual team members are
likely to be highly differentiated in response to global competitive
pressures and uncertain business environments, potentially hindering
effective collaboration. Notably, the lower the level of integration,
the greater the difficulty of developing shared understanding.
Mutual or collective trust is a shared psychological state
that is characterized by an acceptance of vulnerability based on
expectations of intentions or behaviors of others within the team.
As members are geographically dispersed and often from different
backgrounds, experiences, and cultures, trust is difficult to establish
in virtual teams. Thus, it is how the team is designed and managed that
creates enabling conditions.
Design Factors
There
are a number of structures and systems which critically enable virtual
team success. Design of a virtual team involves structuring the
interactions; what kind of communication tools are used; how much
face-to-face time will be possible, etc. These design factors fall into
five categories: context, group structure, technology, people, and
process.
First, those structures that comprise the organizational context
include education and training, rewards, reviews such as performance
evaluation systems, and selection. Second, the virtual team’s structure
works to promote task accomplishment through goals, leadership, task
design, and social structures. Third, information technology provides
the infrastructure for virtual collaboration by allowing teams to
communicate and coordinate their work. The challenge here is determining
which technologies are appropriate for what tasks and when. Fourth, the
people who work in virtual teams should possess certain capabilities to
work effectively with others, such as sufficient task related knowledge
and skills. Further, team members need to have a tolerance for
ambiguity to deal with the unstructured communication that characterizes
virtual teamwork. Finally, one’s team and work processes can help or
hinder the creation of enabling conditions. This includes the creation
of effectives means of communication, decision making, and conflict
resolution by leaders and managers.
Virtuality and Degree of Differences
As
explored above, Gibson & Cohen (2003) indicated that the
relationship between design factors and enabling conditions is moderated
by the degree of virtuality and degree of differences.
It follows that the greater the degree of virtuality and degree of
differences, the more difficult it will be to establish supportive
enabling conditions. The degree of virtuality includes the degree of
electronic dependency and geographical dispersion, while the degree of
differences includes the degree of variation in culture, language,
organization, and function.
Outputs
The
outputs of virtual work include all the things that result from the
team’s work processes. These can be organized into two categories:
business outcomes and human outcomes. Possible business outcomes are
goal achievement, productivity, timeliness, customer satisfaction,
organization learning, innovation, and cycle time. Possible human
outcomes include team member attitudes such as commitment, satisfaction,
and longevity, i.e., the capacity to work together in the future.
Often, these judgments of performance are subjective and depend
on the team’s manager or other stakeholders in its social system.
Studies have found that effectiveness can increase the greater the
virtuality of a team, but only when many of the features in the
framework are in place. For example, teams which fostered a shared
identity by communicating consistently, developing relationships, and
openly acknowledging cultural differences were better able to harness
the energy and commitment of members. Such strong team identity may help to allow for constructive controversy
which enables the open sharing of views, knowledge and perspective
coinciding with members’ identities. As Gibson and co-authors (2020)
found, teams with high resilience, tolerance for ambiguity, and strong
team identification experienced less intrapersonal identity conflict and
therefore thrived more at work.
Likewise, formalization processes that help to establish the global
team as a source of identity, such as implementing rules and procedures
early on and clarifying team boundaries, increase knowledge sharing and
thus improve team effectiveness.
Gibson and her colleagues (2021) further found that virtual teams
were more effective when they were able to recognize cues indicating
when existing technologies had become constraints and strategically
change their technology affordances to accommodate shifts in knowledge
management activities.
Teams which used a “dynamic connection repertoire” to co-evolve their
purpose and technology were highly successful, as opposed to teams which
failed to shift to different technologies as task needs changed.
Other studies have compared students working in purely virtual teams to purely face-to-face teams and found mixed results. Tan et al.
found that teams which used their dialogue technique were more
satisfied with decisions made in the team. One study found that a
traditional team started out more satisfied than a virtual team. Then,
in less than a year, the satisfaction of the virtual team rose and
exceeded the satisfaction of the traditional team. Women were more satisfied than men with virtual teams and were also more satisfied compared to women in face-to-face teams. Team members that were more satisfied were more likely to have had training and used more communication methods compared to unsatisfied team members.
Types
The most common types of virtual teams include:
1. Networked teams
2. Parallel teams
3. Project development teams
4. Work, production or functional teams
5. Service teams
6. Offshore ISD teams
7. Global Virtual Teams
Networked teams
Generally, networked teams
are geographically distributed and not necessarily from the same
organization. These teams are frequently created and just as frequently
dissolved; they are usually formed to discuss specific topics where
members from the area of expertise, possibly from different
organizations, pitch their ideas in the same discussion. Depending on
the complexity of the issue, additional members to the team may be added
at any time. The duration these teams last may vary significantly
depending on how fast or slow the issue is resolved.
Parallel teams
Parallel
teams are highly task oriented teams that usually consist of
specialized professionals. While they are generally only required for
short spans of time, unlike networked teams, they are not dissolved
after completion of the tasks. The team may be either internal or
external to the organization.
Project development teams
Similar
to parallel teams, these teams are geographically distributed and may
operate from different time zones. Project development teams are mainly
focused on creating new products, information systems or organizational
processes for users and/or customers. These teams exist longer than
parallel teams and have the added ability to make decisions rather than
just make recommendations. Similar to networked teams, project
development teams may also add or remove members of their team at any
given time, as needed for their area of expertise.
Work, production or functional teams
These
teams are totally function specific where they only work on a
particular area within an organization (i.e. finance, training,
research, etc.). Operating virtually from different geographical
locations, these teams exist to perform regular or ongoing tasks.
Service teams
Service
teams are geographically located in different time-zones and are
assigned to a particular service such as customer support, network
upgrades, data maintenance, etc. Each team works on providing the
particular service in their daylight hours and at the end of day, work
is delegated to the next team which operates in a different time zone so
that there is someone handling the service 24 hours a day.
Offshore ISD teams
Offshore ISD outsourcing teams are independent service provider teams that a company can subcontract portions of work to.
These teams usually work in conjunction with an onshore team. Offshore
ISD is commonly used for software development as well as international
R&D projects.
Global virtual teams
Global
Virtual Teams (GVT) are defined as “a group of workers, formally
recognized by the organization as a team, with members from different
countries who are collectively accountable for outputs across locations,
and who utilize technology to some degree to accomplish their work”.
These teams usually span multiple countries and excel at their ability
to transfer best practices across sites, resulting in substantial
improvements in operations. However, they may struggle with establishing
effective communication which engenders trust and engages team members.
Management
According to Maznevksi and Chudoba (2000), the life circle of virtual team management includes five stages:
1. Preparations
2. Launch
3. Performance management
4. Team development
5. Disbanding
Preparations
The
initial task during the implementation of a team is the definition of
the general purpose of the team together with the determination of the
level of virtuality that might be appropriate to achieve these goals.
Purpose is generally translated into certain action steps for people to
on with a defined structure consisting of common goals, individual tasks
and results.
A number of factors may affect the performance of members of a virtual
team. For example, team members with a higher degree of focused
attention and aggregate lower levels of temporal dissociation (or flow
) may have higher performance. Further, members with higher degrees of
attention focus may prefer asynchronous communication channels, while
those with low levels of flow may prefer synchronous communication
channels.
These decisions are usually determined by strategic factors such as
mergers, increase of the market span, cost reductions, flexibility and
reactivity to the market, etc. Management-related activities taking
place during the preparation phase include drafting a mission statement,
personnel selection, task design, rewards system design, organizational
integration, and choosing appropriate technologies for the tasks at
hand.
Launch
In many
cases, at the beginning of virtual teamwork, members make a point to
meet each other face-to-face. Crucial elements of such a “kick-off”
workshop are getting acquainted with the other team members, clarifying
the team goals, clarifying the roles and functions of the team members,
information and training how communication technologies can be used
efficiently, and developing general rules for the teamwork. As a
consequence, “kick-off” workshops are expected to promote clarification
of team processes, trust building, building of a shared interpretative
context, and high identification with the team.
Getting acquainted, goal clarification and development of
intra-team rules are also usually accomplished during this phase.
Initial field data that compares virtual teams with and without such
“kick-off” meetings confirm a general positive impact on team
effectiveness, although more differentiated research is necessary.
Experimental studies demonstrate that getting acquainted before the
start of computer-mediated work facilitates cooperation and trust.
Technology Agility
As
soon as possible after launch, virtual teams must agree upon norms for
technology use. Technology is essential to members’ interaction and
communication. The electronic dependence integral to virtual work can
however create logistical and technological constraints that limit
informal spontaneous interacting and informal feedback, hindering
knowledge interpretation and making corrective behavior more difficult.
Therefore, team members must choose technology carefully, in order to
offer the affordances needed at a given point in time, as each
technology brings with it a number of affordances as well as constraints
for interaction.
An affordance is a purpose for use, and technology affordances refer to
the mutually supportive relationship between human-endowed purposes to
an activity and the technology use.
Importantly, the need for certain affordances change over time as
teams’ tasks evolve.
Gibson and her colleagues (2021) found that teams which were the most
successful in progressing across different knowledge management
activities used a “dynamic connection repertoire”,
which is symbiotic with the nature of the task as it evolves over time.
Rather than keeping a static technology repertoire, teams which
co-evolved their purpose and technology affordances were better able to
sustain effectiveness.
A series of psychosocial cues were identified by Gibson and her
colleagues, which signal the need to shift to different technologies,
because the current technology use is failing to meet the teams’ needs.
These cues pertained to how well information was being shared and
understood by all team members, and the extent to which members were
engaged in the team. Technologies which allow for higher media richness,
such as video and screen-sharing, can help reduce inconsistencies in
context and make communication more personal and effective.
Performance Management
As
time progresses in a virtual team, work effectiveness and a
constructive team climate also have to be maintained using performance
management strategies, such as those associated with leadership,
conflict within virtual teams, and team members' motivation.
Leadership is a central challenge in virtual teams, as direct
control is difficult when team managers are not at the same location as
the team members. As a consequence, delegative management principles are
considered that shift parts of classic managerial functions to the team
members. However, team members only accept and fulfill such managerial
functions when they are motivated and identify with the team and its
goals, which is typically more difficult to achieve in virtual
teams.Empirical research summarizes three leadership approaches that
differ in the degree of team member autonomy: (1) electronic monitoring
as an attempt to realize directive leadership over distance, (2)
management by objectives (MBO) as an example for delegative leadership
principles, and (3) self-managing teams as an example for rather
autonomous teamwork.
With regard to conflict, predominant research issues have been
conflict escalation and disinhibited communication (“flaming”), the fit
between communication media and communication contents, and the role of
non-job-related communication.
One of the important needs for successful conflict resolution is the
ability to have every member of the group together repeatedly over time.
Effective dispersed groups show spikes in presence during communication
over time, while ineffective groups do not have as dramatic spikes.
For the management of motivational and emotional processes, three
groups of such processes have been addressed in empirical
investigations so far: motivation and trust, team identification and
cohesion, and satisfaction of the team members. Since most of the
variables are originated within the person, they can vary considerably
among the members of a team, requiring appropriate aggregation
procedures for multilevel analyses (e.g. motivation may be mediated by
interpersonal trust).
Team Development
The
success and satisfaction of virtual teams can be supported by personnel
and team development interventions. The development of such training
concepts should be based on an empirical assessment of the needs and/or
deficits of the team and its members, and the effectiveness of the
trainings should be evaluated empirically.
The steps of team developments include assessment of needs/deficits,
individual and team training, and evaluation of training effects.
Assessing behaviors of the team members to identify behavioral cues may
improve virtual team dynamics and increase team productivity. Behaviors
may be assessed through DiSC assessments.
Virtual teams have become more pertinent due to Covid-19. For
managers, some of the ways to foster virtual team growth and success
include monitoring trust levels, focusing on communication improvements,
fostering inclusion via emotional safety within a group, and actively
discussing teamwork with the group frequently.
Disbanding and Re-integration
Finally,
while some teams remain ongoing and continue with new tasks or members,
some virtual teams with shorter time frames go through a phase of
disbanding and reintegration, during which members return to in-person
offices or join other virtual projects. This disbanding and
reintegration of team members is an important issue that has been
neglected in both empirical and conceptual work on virtual teams. When
virtual project teams have a short life cycle and reform again quickly,
careful and constructive disbanding is crucial in order to maintain high
motivation and satisfaction among employees. Members of transient
project teams anticipate the end of the teamwork in the foreseeable
future, which in turn can overshadow interaction with other team members
and shared outcomes. The final stage of group development should be a
gradual emotional disengagement that includes both sadness about
separation and (in successful groups) joy and pride in the achievements
of the team.
Strengths of Virtual Teams
Team Composition
Virtual
teams may help to create a more equal workplace, discouraging age,
race, and disability discrimination by forcing individuals to interact
with others whose differences challenge their assumptions. Physically
disadvantaged employees are also able to participate more in teams where
communication is virtual, where they may not have previously been able
to due to physical limitations of an office or other workspace.
Virtual teams also create a more accessible workplace for those who
care for children or other family members, or workers who prefer
flexible work arrangements for a wide range of reasons. By enabling more
flexible and equal working conditions, virtual teams significantly
expand the pool of available expertise, thereby allowing firms to
acquire the best possible candidates.
Moreover, virtual teams’ use of communication technologies also helps to mitigate some problems of cultural diversity.
For instance, email as a medium of communication does not transfer
accents and carries fewer noticeable verbal language differences than
voice communication. Cultural barriers are not removed from the team,
but are instead shielded from view in situations where they are
irrelevant. In fact, simply understanding team diversity and
accommodating it can strengthen the relationship between team members of
different cultures.
Innovation
When
managed effectively, virtual teams can be highly effective in promoting
innovation, creativity, and participation. For example, in Gibson and
Gibbs’ (2006) study of design team innovation, teams were more
innovative as virtuality increased when they had a psychologically safe
communication climate.
Because a company is able to recruit from a larger pool of employees
when using virtual teams, a growing amount of talent and distributed
expertise is obtainable without the employee traveling often. The use of
virtual teams also allows employees to participate in multiple projects
within the company that are located on different sites.
This in turn helps the company by allowing them to reuse existing
resources so that they are not required to hire a new employee to do the
same job.
Chidambaram and Bostrom (1993) found that virtual teams generate more ideas compared to traditional teams. Part of this effect can be attributed to cultural diversity, which has been shown to positively impact group decision-making. Combined with collaborative conflict management, groups of individuals from different cultural perspectives are more likely to actively participate in group decision making.
The differing backgrounds and experiences of these group members also
encourage creativity and create conflicting viewpoints, which make it
more likely that multiple options are explored and considered.
Geographic Reach
Multinational
organizations often deploy global teams which span various national
locations to serve as mechanisms for coordinating core operations across
geographical and cultural boundaries.
These virtual teams help to enhance knowledge sharing and integration
across company locations, thereby expanding the geographic reach of firm
operations at relatively low cost.
Virtual teams further boost firms’ ability to identify and transfer
best practices across locations, resulting in a substantial improvement
to the operational efficiency of each site while preventing any one site
from “re-inventing the wheel”.
National Diversity
Though
national diversity may sometimes lead to conflicts and poor internal
communication among team members due to differing ideas of a team and
its operation,
when managed correctly, virtual teams enable firms to take advantage of
diverse and creative viewpoints. Notably, virtual teams are susceptible
to intrapersonal identity conflict and struggle to develop a shared
team vision due to strong identification with subgroups.
Yet, these coordination problems and obstacles to effective
communication may be solved by actively understanding and accepting
differences in cultures.
A multi-country study, based on the GLOBE culture model conducted by
Gibson and Gibbs (2006), found that virtual communication environments
were experienced differently by people from different cultures.
The culture dimension individualism-collectivism was most strongly and
very significantly related to how positively or negatively team members
experienced videoconferences and telephone conferences, compared to
face-to-face meetings. People from collectivistic societies showed a
stronger preference for face-to-face meetings and evaluated virtual
meetings more negatively compared to people from more individualistic
societies.
However, Haas (2006) discovered that a mix of locals and cosmopolitans was optimal for global virtual team performance. Research examining product development efforts in over 20 firms
has shown that when diverse members of project teams combined their
perspectives in a highly iterative way to improve integrated information
flow, they were more innovative.
This is echoed by Gibbs and Gibson’s 2006 study which established that a
psychologically safe communication climate where members feel
comfortable asking questions can help bridge national differences,
reduce ingroup/outgroup bias, and resolve conflicts, as teams who
communicate openly are more likely to develop a common frame of
reference and shared mental model.
Ultimately, the exchange of diverse perspectives and information among
global team members has been found to improve team and organizational
performance through the generation of better knowledge sharing and
higher quality solutions.
Reduction in Relocation and Travel
Virtual
teams can save travel time and cost, significant expenses for
businesses with multiple locations or having virtual clients located in
multiple places. They also reduce disruption in the normal workday by
not requiring an individual to physically leave their workspace. This improved efficiency can directly translate to saved costs for a company.
Strategies to Mitigate Challenges of Virtual Work
Despite
the improvement in telecommunication to overcome distance as an
obstacle for collaboration, working in separate locations still
increases the odds that people are not on common ground, and are not
aware of it. Common ground, shared mutual knowledge, is an important
element to successful communication and coordinated activity. Working
separately and communicating through technology makes it more difficult
to detect and resolve misunderstandings from a lack of common ground. As such, virtual teams often require a longer time to reach decisions.
However, virtual work has implications for relational
impoverishment at work due to lower frequency of face-to-face
interactions and lowered richness of communication.
One major hurdle in drawing definitive conclusions is that studies of
this innovation appear in dispersed literatures including information
systems, logistics, industrial relations, psychology, operations, real
estate, management, attracting the interest of scholars in multiple disciplines.
Findings regarding challenges are presented below, but it is important
to note that many mainstream models, largely developed with face-to-face
workers in mind, often fail to account for the way telecommuters and
virtual workers have challenged traditional labor structures.
Technology and Common Ground
When
team members are highly dispersed, members are embedded in different
external contexts and thus have less shared contextual knowledge,
leading participants to take for granted common knowledge. Sole and Edmondson (2002) call this “situated knowledge,”
finding evidence that the majority of conceptual misunderstandings
resulted from lack of awareness of or failure to appropriate such
knowledge. Such lack of mutual knowledge of each other’s situations increases coordination problems in acquiring knowledge and resources. Transactive memory
is difficult to establish in virtual teams as it is often not
transferred to new members, contextual knowledge is not kept or
well-documented, and communication is indirect or infrequent.
Development of this type of common ground is particularly difficult in
virtual teams which are structurally dynamic or experience high
turnover, as teams with a short history together tend to lack effective patterns of information sharing and working together, limiting the amount and variety of information that can be communicated across team members.
One way to develop common ground in virtual teams is to develop a
psychologically safe communication climate which acts as a moderating
variable that can overcome mistrust and turn the team’s fluid membership
into a source of new ideas and expertise. A supportive communication climate includes variables such as participation in decision-making,
encouraging members to speak up, raising differences for discussion,
engaging in spontaneous and informal communication, providing
unsolicited information, remaining open to new ideas and perspectives,
and bridging differences by suspending judgment.
This helps to create trust and reduce perceptions of risk and
uncertainty about members’ motives, in turn creating incentives to build
a shared history.
Another way to develop common knowledge rests on managers’
ability to act as politicians to manage the power dynamic inside and
outside the team. This may reduce members’ hesitancy to share information, leading to enhanced innovation.
A study by Gibbs and her colleagues (2021) indicates that managers can
also bridge imbalances in situated knowledge during meetings by
discussing trivial topics and surfacing taken-for-granted assumptions as
a way to elicit differing opinions and hidden knowledge.
In one instance, a manager increased dialogue among team members by
deliberately refraining from giving people answers in order to encourage
them to cooperate and co-create knowledge.
Though more difficult than in collocated teams, careful management and
co-presence strategies can successfully establish common ground among
members of a virtual team.
Uneven Distribution of Information
Errors
in the distribution of messages are more common in technology than
face-to-face interaction, leading to a lack of common ground.
When digital technology replaces face-to-face communication, it is
often difficult to keep track of the messages that have been both sent
and received by a receiver and vice versa.
For instance, if collaborators have two email addresses, a primary and
a secondary one, some messages may be sent by the server to the primary
addresses and some to the secondary addresses, leading to information
loss and confusion among team members. Intimacy is further threatened as
perceived electronic mediation increases because such mediation leads
to uneven information transfer and coordination challenges and reduces
the amount of informal interaction, as the number of casual encounters
and unplanned conversations is much higher among collocated colleagues.
Simultaneously, differences in native language and status- the
“prestige, esteem, worth, or relative social position of an individual
or group”- inhibit open dialogue and can lead to uneven participation, one-way flows of knowledge, and exclusion.
These status differences are subjective and socially constructed
through interpersonal processes of stratification that play out in both
verbal and nonverbal communication.
Consequently, teams which foster an open dialogic environment through
conversational turn-taking, active listening, and energy-enhancing
practices achieve better participation and overcome status differences,
in turn boosting collective intelligence and limiting miscommunications.
Strategies to mitigate uneven distribution of information include
structure-enabling practices which promote equal participation, such as
regular calls, clear agendas established in advance of meetings,
rotating presentations to give voice to lower-status members, and
post-call follow ups to ensure a sense of role clarity and
predictability.
Furthermore, fostering knowledge repositories which seek to not only
create new knowledge but record and catalogue existing knowledge helps
to mitigate uneven information distribution and facilitate ongoing
knowledge transfer.
Managers can make a big difference in team participation by
establishing dialogic practices which build rapport and trust,
strengthen team communication and participation, and invite input from
everyone. These practices help to bridge status differences and ensure team members are on the same page.
Differences in What Information is Salient
Computer-mediated
communication (CMC) reduces nonverbal cues about interpersonal
affections such as tone, warmth, and attentiveness, which contribute to
message clarity and communication richness, and collaborators who use
CMC often use more direct styles of communication with fewer social cues
than those in face-to-face conditions.
Zhao (2003) found that communicators use physical and linguistic
“co-presence”- the subjective perception of closeness versus distance to
make inferences about one another’s knowledge.
Virtual workers are likely to have reduced contact and exposure to
strong organizational structures and processes (including organizational
dress, symbols, rituals, and ceremonies) that typically foster
organizational identification.
Difficulty in interpreting knowledge reduces experimentation, which may
impact the improvisation processes vital to engendering innovation.
In face-to-face interaction, the speaker makes the importance of a
message known through tone of voice, facial expression, and bodily
gestures. The receiver may acknowledge understanding through exact
feedback called “back-channel”
communication, such as head nods, brief verbalizations like “yeah” and
“okay,” or smiles. These methods of emphasis and feedback ensure parties
are on common ground. However, these methods are often lost in digital
means of communication. For example, in an e-mail exchange, the point of
the message as intended by the sender may be overlooked,
misinterpreted, or given different priority. Furthermore, messages met
with silence are highly ambiguous and can act as a barrier to
establishing common ground. For instance, silence can be due to
technical problems within the technology that mediates the parties
involved in communication, or it can be due to the fact that one of the
partners is out of town and cannot reply to the message. Silence can
also be taken in many ways, as agreement, disagreement, passive
aggression, and indifference, or in the case of dispersed groups, that
the message was undelivered. Silence may lead to conflict because it
blurs the notion of what is known and unknown in the group, signaling
the absence of common ground.
Fully implementing “back-channel” communication can be time-consuming.
The lack of convenient cues in digital communication make dispersed
collaboration less conducive for the establishment of mutual knowledge.
The challenges presented by electronic dependence may be
mitigated through the use of technologies allowing for higher media
richness, which help to provide context and nuance in virtual
communications. Remote collaborations may be enhanced by co-presence design or the
development of tools to enhance perceived co-presence such as online
avatars or added conference call features like visual representation,
turn taking, or private chat.
Further, Maznevski and Chudoba (2000) found that developing predictable
temporal rhythms of technology and routines of media usage improved
close working relationships. Subsequent research has also highlighted the importance of co-presence for psychological well-being and productivity.
Moreover, practices such as informal conversations among
colleagues, virtual “water cooler chat,” personal introductions, and
discussions on trivial topics help to build connectedness and trust
among virtual teams.
For instance, many companies during the Covid-19 pandemic introduced
1:1 buddies, virtual coffee breaks, and digital town halls in order to
increase co-presence and team identification.
Team members who trust one another are more likely to ask follow-up
questions for clarification, avoid snap judgments born out of
miscommunication, and accept others’ advice and information. This in turn reduces the challenges associated with lost social cues during digital communication.
Differences in Speed, Timing, and Responsiveness
Speed
and timing of communication is inevitably not as uniformed in digital
communication as it is in face-to-face interaction. This is due to the
fact that some parties have more restricted access to communication than
others. The differences in relative speed and timing of feedback and
conference calls are aggravated by differences in time zones, which can
sharpen status differences and bolster resentment from sidelined
locations. One part of the team on one side of the world may be asleep
during another part’s normal workday, and the group has to work around
this. These issues may be ameliorated by alternating night and morning
calls for each location, having two separate meetings for different
zones, or asking certain locations to participate in calls at unusual
hours.
In some cases, the problems arising from differences in relative
speed may be attributed instead to a lack of conscientiousness on the
part of the slower partners. In fact, a fluctuating feedback cycle is
more destructive than a uniformed feedback cycle of a slower pace. Asynchronous communication tends to be more difficult to manage and requires much greater coordination than synchronous communication.
As Gibson et al. (2011) found, developing consistent, time-patterned
routines of communication may help to build close working relationships.
Technology affordances such as a public forum where team members can
post and reply to questions may also encourage timely responses and
enhance ongoing knowledge transfer.
In other instances, low responsiveness stems from cultural norms
which dictate how quickly workers are expected to respond and when they
can be reached. For example, one study found that Western Australians
may express a “can do” attitude and a direct communication style while
Jamaicans tend to be more conflict-avoidant in organizational settings
and have a more fluid orientation to time.
These cultural differences play an important role in how power and
status differences are fostered and how they impact participation in
teams.
Rather than “sweeping them under the rug,” it is important to
acknowledge differences in culture or opinion so they can be addressed
through adaptation and agreeable solutions. Shared norms which bridge the differences can help resolve potential conflicts in preferences.
Virtual teams have also historically highlighted a generational
gap, as many older executives and senior managers do not have as much
experience with computer technology as their younger counterparts.
These senior members must then exert extra energy to catch up to the
younger generation and navigate new means of communicating. This
difficulty is less pertinent today, as most workers have some level of
fluency with digital media and firms often provide training to equalize
workers’ knowledge of communication tools.
Emerging Issues
Covid-19 Pandemic
As
a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the virtual dimension of teamwork
has gained greater prominence everywhere from social media to academic
scholarship.
Research on remote work has largely focused on outcomes differentiating
between individuals who do and do not engage in remote work.
However, as Zhang, Yu and Marin (2021) point out, during the Covid-19
pandemic, many employees were forced to work remotely. The beginning of
the pandemic was marked by a rapid transition to virtual work, closures
of traditional workspaces, physical distancing requirements,
difficulties distributing technology and adapting to at-home work
conditions, and feelings of isolation and hopelessness among newly
virtual employees.
Within this, the employee satisfaction and health outcomes
associated with virtual work, largely neglected by pre-pandemic
literature, have quickly come to the forefront of management research.
Pre-pandemic studies found that the high levels of perceived electronic
dependence and lack of copresence which often accompany virtual work can
negatively affect critical psychological states of experienced
meaningfulness, experienced responsibility, and knowledge of results. Likewise, while a supportive communication climate predicts satisfaction and commitment and includes variables such as participation in decision-making and communication openness,
these factors are more difficult to establish in virtual settings.
Thus, satisfaction among the team members of a virtual team has been
shown to be less positive than satisfaction among face-to-face teams.
This drop in satisfaction is due in part to difficulties building trust
without face-to-face communications, a necessary part of high-performing virtual teams.
However, effective management and adherence to proper goal setting
principles specific to the nature of work virtual teams require can lead
to improved team effectiveness.
If a team and its corresponding management is not prepared for the
challenges of a virtual team, this will be difficult to achieve.
Recent research by Zhang, Yu, and Marin (2021: 802) discovered
that workers had a generally positive attitude towards working at home,
citing the availability of collaboration and communication tools,
increased productivity, and remote learning and flexible work hours.
Conversely, workers frequently complained that long hours of
teleconferencing could be draining, individuals’ capacity to work
remotely was impeded by suboptimal home office setups,
information-sensitive work was susceptible to cyber-security attacks,
and that decentralized set-ups harmed work team engagement.
While some workers experienced improved work-life balance due to
spending more time with family, others reported their work-life balance
was harmed due to difficulties maintaining the boundary between family
and work.
Care in Connecting
Rather
than “social distancing,” Gibson (2020) proposes the approach Care in
Connecting, which acknowledges the need for caution in terms of physical
proximity, but also promotes the urgent need for compassion that
individuals and organizations provide and receive. Care in Connecting
centers around three principles which counter the prejudice, isolation,
and hopelessness associated with social distancing: inclusion,
copresence, and vitality.
Care in Connecting creates inclusion when diverse voices are
heard and incorporated online. A number of scholars addressing inclusion and intercultural collaboration
have revealed the importance of recognizing the uniqueness of
individual constituents while also cultivating a sense of belonging to a
collectivity. Research shows that members who identify with their team
are more likely to display desirable individual workplace outcomes such
as helping behavior, organizational citizenship behavior, lowered social
undermining and social loafing, lessened workplace bullying, and fewer
turnover intentions.
Organizations prioritizing inclusion during the pandemic have adopted
approaches including overtime pay, unlimited sick days, paid leaves of
absence, free trials of higher education to help connect job seekers to
opportunities, and donated medical supplies.
These inclusionary practices involve understanding employees’ unique
experiences and avoiding assumptions, stereotypes, and grand
generalizations.
Care in Connecting also creates co-presence, the experience of
psychological proximity achievable online, to counteract feelings of
isolation felt as a result of social distancing
(Gibson, 2020: 166). Key to virtual team effectiveness is the team’s
ability to understand which tool is most effective given the task and to
selectively tailor combinations of technology to achieve copresence.
Many organizations have sought to implement new practices during the
pandemic to build a sense of copresence by ensuring access to technology
and establishing the human element. Examples include purchasing laptops
and audio equipment for workers, loaning tablets to students,
implementing virtual coffee breaks or lunches, inviting workers’
children to join meetings, and promoting opportunities to connect as
human beings.
Finally, Care in Connecting can enable vitality, a sense of
psychological and physical energy, to address the sense of hopelessness
engendered by social distancing.
A significant body of research indicates that people both mimic and
feel the emotions displayed by others and can receive and experience
energy from interpersonal interactions.
Organizations which provided examples of positivity and resilience in
online interactions were able to spark positive emotional contagion and
increased vitality. Many organizations communicated simple messages of
care and composure, offered morning meditation sessions, allowed pets on
screen for relaxation, conducted online yoga and fitness sessions, and
sent out care packages to employees.
Emerging Research
There
is still much unknown about the impact of Covid-19 on virtual teamwork,
particularly in how employees will respond in the long-term to the
blurring of public and private space and how the reorganization of
reopened sites will unfold.
Emerging research suggests that returning to work in the “new normal”
after being out of work or teleworking to some capacity creates issues
with employee focus, engagement, and mental reattachment to upcoming
work.
Furthermore, Shao et al. (2021) argue that workers’ newfound
flexibility in working from home or at the office is impacted by
stressors they encountered on the previous day.
This research has implications for understanding the driving factors of
daily work location choices, and how telework will unfold in a
post-Covid world.
Another research concern centers on the nonnegligible chance of
community transmission in the workplace which poses a threat to
returning workers.
While many workplaces shut down following the onset of the Covid-19
pandemic, others in essential industries had to remain operational, thus
exposing employees to virus dangers.
However, firms varied significantly in the degree to which they took
action to protect their employees. Steinbach, Kautz and Korsgaard (2021)
found that these firm compensation actions were associated with a
growth in positive stakeholder sentiment.
The reintegration of workers into face-to-face work settings has also
launched academic debate on privacy and ethical concerns surrounding
mandatory vaccination requirements and/or weekly testing. While our
knowledge of online collaboration has yet to incorporate the dynamic
urgency created by the pandemic, it is very likely that closures of
traditional workplaces, physical distancing requirements, and the
difficulties firms face reopening sites will fundamentally shift
research on virtual work.
