Best Practices for Virtual Team Effectiveness

The purpose of this chapter is to improve the understanding of what makes virtual teams effective. This is done by identifying the best practices for individual team members, the best practices for leaders and sponsors of virtual teams, and the best practices for the organizations that the virtual teams are a part of. Best practices in these categories were identified from: (1) empirical evidence from case studies of six existing virtual teams; (2) the existing literature related to virtual teams; and, (3) traditional team (i.e., collocated) and telework literature. The chapter concludes with implications for organizations and potential research directions.

The Impact of External Factors on Virtual Teams

Practitioners and researchers need to pay attention to how corporate organizing structures are impacting and are impacted by virtual work environments. Virtual teams are powerful organizing mechanisms, but they are not without limitations. This chapter reports on two cases in which dynamics outside the virtual project teams powerfully affected the teams. These cases, both based on studies of real project teams operating inside corporations, highlight the desirability of understanding virtual teams in context. While external factors are not unique to teamwork, their role has not been explored in depth in research on virtual teams. Dynamic forces outside teams seem more difficult to anticipate and to identify when team members are working virtually, and these powerful but invisible dynamics can be frustrating to virtual team leaders and members. Concluded in this chapter is that contrary to initial expectations, virtual teams are not replacing traditional forms of organizing. They are coexisting with traditional forms and dynamics, such as business drivers, hierarchies, departments, strategic priorities, and business needs. This coexistence can be fraught with conflict.

Effective Virtual Teams

It is likely that employees will work on a virtual team at some point in their careers. However, it is questionable how effectively organizations, training, and technology support the needs of virtual teams. Organizations must communicate what collaborative and knowledge-sharing behaviors are expected, establish reward and recognition systems that reinforce those behaviors, ensure that employees have the skills and tools required to fulfill those expectations, and develop managers that role model and reinforce the desired behaviors. Collaborative technologies must also become more self-managing, provide more compelling asynchronous capabilities, and consider that individuals may be part of many teams, thereby requiring better data aggregation and visualization.

Trust and the Trust Placement Process in Metateam Projects

Metateams are temporary organizations composed of two or more geographically and organizationally dispersed teams that are commercially linked by project-specific agreements. In a global business environment demanding innovation, flexibility, and responsiveness, metateams represent a major change in the way organizations and practitioners conduct IT development projects. However, as we found in a recently concluded theory-building study of a real-life metateam, managing metateams presents unique difficulties due to conflicting demands arising from multiple realities. Argued in this chapter is that the effectiveness of the trust placement process (rather than just the exhibition of high levels of trust) significantly affects project success.

Trust, Rationality and the Virtual Team

Virtual teams need trust in order to function. Trust is an efficient way of gaining group cooperation. Online, trust is more effective than instruction or authority or status in getting people who are largely strangers to one another to work together. But trust is not a simple quality. The kind of trust that is the cement of distance relations of a global or virtual kind is different from the type of trust that binds face-to-face interactions and from the procedural kind of trust that operates in regional or national organizations of a traditional managerial kind. This study looks at the ways in which trust between virtual team members is generated. “Trust between strangers” is optimally generated when persons are allowed to self-organize complex orders and create objects and processes of high quality. Also looked at are the kinds of personalities best suited to working in a virtual collaborative environment. The study concludes that persons who prefer strong social or procedural environments will be less effective in a virtual environment. In contrast, self-steering (“stoic”) personality types have characteristics that are optimally suited to virtual collaboration.

Mediating Complexity

Virtual teams are playing an increasingly important role in organizations. However, virtual teams’ increasing team member interaction beyond traditional organizational boundaries has outpaced our understanding of their interpersonal dynamics and unique communication characteristics. Research shows that the development of interpersonal and group communications between team members is an important factor in effective working relationships; however, little research has been done on the effects of crossing organizational, cultural, and time and distance boundaries on relationship building in virtual teams. This chapter reports on a field study of New Zealand-based virtual team leaders working with boundary spanning virtual teams. From a team leaders’ perspective, boundary-crossing issues (organizational, cultural, language, time and distance) can affect relationship building in many important ways. These effects are explored and the implications for practice and research are also discussed.

Long Distance Leadership

Because virtual teams are becoming more common in global organizations, research that explicates issues related to this emergent organizational phenomenon is necessary. One major topic is the leadership of virtual teams. Drawing on data from a series of in-depth interviews with project leaders, senior managers, and executives of six global organizations, in this chapter, what virtual team leaders perceive to be effective communicative tactics in virtual settings will be illustrated. Specifically, tactics related to two leadership challenges commonly cited in the academic and popular press are explored: (a) overcoming virtual team members’ feelings of isolation—feelings of disconnectedness, lack of cohesiveness, and limited identification with the virtual team leader and the organization; and (b) building and maintaining trust. Also presented in the chapter are some strategies for managing cross-cultural communication issues, and tips are offered on the use of communication technologies in distanced settings.

Factors Contributing to Knowledge Sharing and Communications in a Large Virtual Work Group

In this chapter, we discuss an eight-factor process model of large virtual groups. A team has been defined as a small group of people that work very closely on a project or process. We define a large work group as a larger group of people who are more loosely connected to one another than a team by a shared work process, project, or strategic goal. The eight factors are organizational support and purpose; egalitarian structure; team culture, trust, collaboration, and relationships; people—skills, expertise, and capabilities; motivation and rewards; communication processes; communication tools; and knowledge sharing. These factors to a greater or lesser degree have been shown to contribute to the effectiveness of communication in a large virtual work group during a two-phase study at Nortel Networks. Qualitative and quantitative results of this study are presented in the chapter. We discuss issues related to communication and knowledge sharing in the chapter as well as recommendations for successful organization and communication in large work groups.

The Multi-Faceted Nature of Virtual Teams

Despite their growing popularity in organizations, our understanding of virtual teams is still at an embryonic stage. As of today, the term “virtual team” has been loosely defined in the academic press, and empirical findings have been generalized across all types of virtual teams. Based on an extensive review of the literature and a series of in-depth interviews with more than 40 experienced virtual team members and leaders, we identified the key characteristics of virtual teamwork as well as those characteristics that distinguish among various virtual team configurations. We posit that researchers must now adopt a multidimensional view of virtual teams in order to adequately compare empirical findings, build a cumulative tradition in this field of research, and provide practitioners with a framework to help them manage virtual teams effectively. Researchers and practitioners must not only recognize the diversity of possible virtual team arrangements but also identify strategies and draw lessons that are contingent upon particular virtual team configurations.

Prelude to Virtual Groups

A study of 76 more and less virtual investment clubs examines the relationships between communication technologies used for club business (from face-to-face to more highly technologically enabled), group leadership role behaviors, and club portfolio value. The results are interesting, with more and less virtual clubs benefiting from different forms of leadership behaviors. Clubs using fewer technologies seem to benefit from a greater focus on socioemotional role (communication) behaviors, while the opposite is found in clubs using more technologies. The effect for procedural role behaviors (agenda setting and the like) appears to run in the opposite direction: clubs using more technologies seem to benefit from a greater focus on procedural role behaviors, while the opposite is found in clubs using fewer technologies. Managers take into account obvious and subtle differences between more and less virtual groups.