Promoting Critical Thinking in Virtual Teams

This chapter aims to raise awareness in leaders and practitioners on how critical thinking is embedded within the performance of virtual teams. The increasingly important nexus between critical thinking and team performance is demonstrated within the specific context of the virtual environment. The chapter is interspersed with brief case studies that demonstrate some of the experiences of Australian-based higher education staff in their efforts to incorporate both critical thinking and virtual teamwork into their pedagogy. A framework of success factors and challenges inherent to virtual teams and critical thinking is provided, which covers five influential factors: technology, student characteristics, educator characteristics, social aspects, and team dynamics. The chapter concludes with some directions for future research.

Decision Making and Decision Support Within New Product Development

There is an extensive literature on new product and process development (NPD). However, the analysis of decision making and decision support requirements in this area is less well researched. Here we discuss decision making in the context of NPD and identify decision types and decision attributes relevant to the NPD context. They illustrate the approach by analyzing NPD decisions in three industrial cases with a focus on early stage NPD decisions. They create a set of attributes with reference to the decision making literature. They find these attributes can be used to codify decisions in order to characterize them. They find the design decisions in these case studies to be creative and brainstorming-led with a low level of structure. The results provide insights both on decision making in NPD in practice and on the requirements for group decision support systems (GDSS) in this area. The authors suggest that an argumentation-based GDSS that allows structure to be developed may be suitable for these decisions. The cases are used to illustrate the application of the approach and show an interesting set of example decision types, but do not cover the range of NPD decisions that may be evident in a larger set of companies.

Promoting Critical Thinking in Virtual Teams

Effective decision-making in a virtual environment is becoming increasingly important as more and more organizations introduce virtual teams into their global businesses. Critical thinking is a reflective practice that has been suggested to enhance the quality of group decision-making in organizations (Natale & Ricci, 2006). However, little is known about the value of critical thinking in a virtual team environment and the ways in which it can be promoted. This chapter provides a conceptual model of informed decision-making based on critical thinking. It further outlines how critical thinking can be promoted in virtual teams through an active shift towards a dialogic learning culture, constituted by collaborative communication behaviors, authentic leadership, and the use of social Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs).

Technology Imperative in Managerial Decision-Making

Decisions can make or mar an organization. Decision-making is a multifaceted and intricate process. This process becomes even more complicated and complex when it comes to organizations, especially in this competitive world. Today, decisions are made not only under uncertainty, with available and/or limited information, but may also be made in a virtual setting. Decision makers may not be engaged in face-to-face deliberations. Hence, understanding the challenges, complexity, and rewards of the use of technology, especially information technology in managerial decision-making, is important. Such an understanding is not only vital in determining the efficacy of managers and their organizations, but also significant in designing future management approaches and organizations. This is the core objective of this chapter.

Leadership in Globally Distributed Virtual Teams

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce readers to various factors that can affect the management of international virtual teams. In examining this topic, the authors provide an overview of what each factor is, note how each factor can create problems in international virtual teams, and explain how effective management—or informed approaches to managing such teams—can help mitigate such challenges. The authors also provide readers/managers with foundational strategies that can facilitate the sharing of information and the creation of trust in international virtual teams.

Enterprise Knowledge Preservation and Management

The decision making process in organizations is constantly evolving with expanding geographical boundaries and ever-changing technology landscape. A major part of decisions and deliberations now typically takes place in collaboration platforms like emails, enterprise social networks, discussion servers, chats, and conferencing services. These platforms contain problem solving insights, recommendations, best practices, expert opinions, and answers, and must be considered part of the organizational knowledge management effort. However, traditional knowledge management techniques do not sufficiently capture the hidden nuggets of knowledge buried in communication logs. In this chapter, the authors describe the need for a paradigm shift in knowledge management strategy and propose semantic social network analysis as a potential solution. They introduce the concept of social knowledge networks and describe knowledge algebra by defining rigorous social metrics. Finally, to demonstrate the applicability of the approach, the authors provide two case studies that lead to identification of experts and mining of best practices from informal communication at the workplace.

Communicative Changes Associated with Repeated Use of Electronic Meeting Systems for Decision-Making Tasks

Although various technologies are widely used to support decision-making teams, we know relatively little about the use of specialized Electronic Meeting Systems (EMSs) and their use over time during ongoing projects. This study addresses that gap by examining how communication affordances (anonymous communication, participation equality, and influence equality) of some EMSs may change with repeated usage of the system for multiple decision-making meetings. Based on an EMS process model and related theories, the authors hypothesize that communicative benefits will decline after initial team interaction. Data from 14 intact decision-making teams (using an EMS for 3 separate meetings) provide strong support for most of the anonymity hypotheses, as perceptions of self and other anonymity decline and confidence in source attributions increases with repeated usage. There was partial support for the predicted changes in participation equality and influence equality. The authors conclude with practical implications and future research directions based on these findings.

Challenge and Complexity of Virtual Team Management

To thrive in our global economy, businesses must continually seek ways to maintain a competitive advantage by supplying the market with innovative and effective products and services. To do this, barriers of space and time must be overcome, conventional business processes must be enhanced, and customer demand must be promptly answered by high-quality, low-cost, or value-based products and services. One way for companies to meet these fast-paced market demands is by utilizing virtual teams. With virtual teams, companies can expand their talent pool beyond geographical barriers. Furthermore, they can incorporate a follow-the-sun process in their business strategy. Combined, this leveraged approach can better position companies to meet market demands in a more timely and cost-effective manner. However, to achieve this competitive advantage, business leaders must thoroughly understand the challenges associated with developing and managing virtual teams. This research chapter examines the reasons for utilizing virtual teams, challenges that stem from diversity, structural and behavioral characteristics, and managerial considerations for effective leadership, supporting technologies, best practices, and future implications.

Fostering Social Innovation through E-Collaboration

Increasing awareness in social problems and the high complexity of social challenges has boosted social innovation efforts in recent years. Social innovation refers to new and innovative solutions to social problems that create social value, involve public good, and affect the society, mostly developed by participation of stakeholders who have interests in the problem. Social innovation leads to social value created through a series of collaborative efforts of public, private, and non-governmental organizations. This chapter highlights the importance of collaboration in social innovation and examines the role of e-collaboration as a group coordination and communication mechanism in the social innovation processes. The first part of the chapter presents evidence on what social innovation is and describes how social innovation intertwines with collaboration. The second part of the chapter defines the key conceptual elements of e-collaboration and explores how e-collaboration can foster social innovation concerning each conceptual element.

Replacing Proprietary Software with Open Source Software

Most companies face high expenditures and numerous challenges in today’s competitive industrial environment where cost of technology can be an extra burden. To address these challenges, businesses can use Open Source Software (OSS). Even though OSS provides many benefits, including high-quality software and substantial profit (Sohn & Mok, 2008), OSS also has a number of disadvantages. In several countries, governments have begun to recognize the importance of OSS and have started to adopt explicit policies on OSS (Cook & Horobin, 2006). Open Source Software holds several compelling benefits for businesses. Information on wide-ranging use and examples of OSS in organizations are scattered and sometimes skewed to a few OSS. The chapter identifies different OSS that are currently used or have the potential to substitute other proprietary software packages in business; how organizations share information and how OSS is used globally by organizations and governments and their implications thereof is reviewed.