Creating the Environment for High Performing Distributed Teams

The organizational workforce has always been a complex landscape. The varying personalities, demographics, and needs have challenged organizations to be legal, fair, and just, while simultaneously competing for market share and profit margins. Although these conditions are not mutually exclusive, due to the global reach for market share and use of supporting technologies, workforces have grown increasingly diverse over the past three decades. Organizations have looked to their Human Resource (HR) division to support business strategy, growth, and development. While a few have stepped up to accommodate, many HR divisions have struggled to support business needs in perhaps the greatest time of flux in modern day business. This is creating a serious issue for most organizations who recognize the competitive way forward is through effective Human Resource Development (HRD). Business success has always been about the people and it will continue to be so. Therefore, organizations struggling to develop their workforce to perform in complex, highly distributed situations will continue to lag (often far behind) the effective workforces of their competitors. This chapter offers best and next practices from HRD leaders accommodating the needs of their businesses.

Trends in Virtual Leadership

This chapter examines emerging trends in virtual leadership through an interview with Elliott Masie, a futurist who has been following trends in learning, leadership, and collaboration for nearly three decades. The interview begins with a discussion of Elliott’s and the Masie Center’s interest in this topic, and then proceeds to explore some of the trends that they are seeing, attempting to separate hype from reality. The chapter then looks toward the future, envisioning what the workplace of the future might look like, and what kinds of skills and practices will be necessary for organizations to continue to be effective as the workplace setting evolves. Elliott brings a perspective to this topic that is grounded not only in his past experience with emerging trends, but also in his current and relevant interactions with global leaders. An interview format was chosen for this chapter in order to allow Elliott’s unique voice and personality to be shared with readers.

A Distributed Requirements Collaboration Process

This chapter outlines a new requirements collaboration process to address these issues. This new process is based on work done by Karl Wiegers in his paper Prioritizing Requirements (Wiegers, 1999), and is extended to include a method of proposing alternate requirements, documenting the negotiation of priority among interested parties, and a way to rationally select priority requirements based on an objective measure of their relative merit. The chapter also introduces an application prototype called the Distributed Requirements Collaboration Tool (DRCT) that was built for use by distributed teams to support the requirements negotiation process described above and also to address the issue of capturing rationale as requirements are negotiated. Lastly, the experience using the DRCT is discussed in order to identify priority requirements for a more functional version of the DRCT.

Trust in Distributed Teams

Creating and maintaining trust amongst distributed team members is required for an organization to benefit from a distributed team model. Where face-to-face interactions were once the only model to gradually create trust, different models are required for a team that is not co-located. This chapter examines the basic need for trust, how the individual comes before the team, barriers to trust, and prepares the reader to examine his or her own situation to improve or create a new team based on trusting professional relationships.

Re-Examining Trust Development and Knowledge Sharing in Virtual Teams

It is crucial to effectively identify and leverage organizational team member knowledge. As virtual teams are becoming increasingly common in global companies, knowledge sharing in virtual teams is gaining attention among practitioners and scholars. In particular, the role of trust in effective knowledge sharing has been emphasized among scholars. However, there have been few attempts to integrate trust and knowledge sharing behaviors in virtual teams. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to present the integrative perspective of knowledge sharing and trust in virtual teams. The authors thoroughly explore the existing literature on different approaches to trust and the knowledge sharing process and then introduce an integrative three-stage process model of trust and knowledge sharing in virtual teams.

The Evolution of Collaborative Work

Organizational designs and the organization of work have evolved over time, but the essence of collaboration has always been paramount, especially for organizations seeking efficiency, effectiveness, and survivability. Starting with a biblical reference, then reviewing animal pack mentality, and thoroughly detailing the innovativeness of human interaction, this chapter explores the evolution of collaborative work.

Globalization

The strategy to improve business results through globalization has become increasingly common. Success in reaping the business value intended from a globalization strategy is, unfortunately, not as common. As national boundaries blur and everyone grows more connected through global collaboration, the dynamics of organizational life grow more complex. These complexities offer challenge, confusion, and frustration – but also great opportunity! The key to achieving improved business results does not hinge on strategies alone, but also on our ability to effectively lead global product and service development teams to successfully execute the strategies. Those struggling the most are the practitioners who find their historic team leadership practices ineffective in today’s global business model. To effectively lead a global team, one must first understand the forces driving our companies to a global business model. This chapter focuses on the forces that fuel and constrain globalization.

New Approaches Needed to Support the Distributed Environment

The implications of all these changes are becoming clearer for HR development, education, and training functions. These changes will make it easier to share information and optimize knowledge creation. They will affect the continuing evolution of the workforce because access to the Internet and a laptop are no longer enough for successful management of a distributed team. Keeping up with change effectively is an important part of a company’s long-term plan. Forward-looking organizations will implement strategies to maximize the benefits of these changes and soften the negative effects. Well-managed distributed teams can be an integral part of a company’s strategy and can provide major benefits to the company.

The Effect of Cultural Dimensions on the Development of Intra-Team Trust in Global Virtual Teams

The widespread adoption of global virtual teams has been driven by an unprecedented need to draw upon talents of employees from around the globe in a manner that is both organizationally and financially feasible. The success of these teams depends largely on the levels of intra-team trust and collaboration they are able to establish throughout the life of their projects. Team members on global virtual teams may differ substantially on a number of cultural dimensions including preferences for individualistic versus collective teamwork, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and contextual communication. This chapter will investigate how these four cultural dimensions are likely to impact intra-team trust within a global virtual team. Suggestions that team leaders can utilize to address these cultural dimensions are also presented.

Teaching Globally Distributed Software Development (DSD)

This chapter describes an approach to building a collaborative teaching community that seeks to address these problems. It begins by identifying the skills students should acquire in a Distributed Software Development (DSD) course and discusses why firsthand experience with DSD problems is essential to learning them. The chapter identifies the attributes that make DSD project courses difficult to develop or teach, and then it describes a distributed team approach to developing a reusable infrastructure and a teaching community to address those difficulties. Future work focuses on building an international community of educators and industry participants interested in partnering to develop and teach DSD courses.