Introduction
A virtual team, also known as virtual workgroup is group of people which is formed over technology (internet) and do not interact face-to-face. The people of the team make combined efforts, and tend to achieve the shared objective which is set by the group. Virtual teams perform their job in a virtual network, which is created by IT and software technologies. To simplify, virtual teams are online teams who interact over the internet to achieve a share goal (Lane, Henry and Martha, 2014). This paper discusses the pros and cons of the the virtual teams and what factors are of importance to create effective virtual teams.
Virtual teams
There are two types of virtual teams; global and local virtual teams. In a global virtual team, members might be from different countries or cities around the world. These members might be of one organization, or different employees from different companies collaborating together to achieve one goal (Lane, Henry and Martha, 2014). Global teams are mostly formed by multinational firms, who have a huge workforce and they try to manage their activities by making virtual teams. These groups also have multicultural approach, where people might be from different cultures around the globe. While, a local virtual team is based on a local or domestic level and is mostly formed by one company. This company can be big or small, having enough resources to manage their operations. Creating virtual team in a local level, helps the company to utilize their resources and employees to develop productive group (Lane, Henry and Martha, 2014).
There are discussions in the past, about the effectiveness of the virtual teams and how they impact the the overall growth of the company (Lane, Henry and Martha, 2014). Every team/group is an inimitable combination of people, tasks, procedures, and environment where they do not share their positive aspects depending on the complexity of the group. There should be conditions set by the virtual groups in the intial stage to produce positive performance. As virtual groups have to work in complex settings where they might not have the comfort zone to work, the companies should make efforts to make their virtual groups advanced in performace to overcome these obstacles. Mostly, in a virtual team setting there is a problem of interpreting a task. People over the internet perceive their tasks differently, and it leads to disruption of the group as the goals are perceived differently in the group.
Characteristics to acquire by virtual teams
There are some characteristics of a virtual team, which should be taken in account by the virtual leader and try to impose on to the group. these characteristics are:
Team composition: virtual teams needs to have a right combination of the people and skills amongst the group members. This combination depends on the technical skills, functional knowledge, tasks, and objective oriented knowledge to manage the operations of the team (Lane, Henry and Martha, 2014). Studies have suggested that having diversity in the chosen members and their charateristics, will help the company produce innovative and quality decisions. However, is most of the companies virtual teams are formed on the convenience (what is available) instead of required skill combination (how it will be effective).
Roles Definition
Roles are described as responsibilities, given to the group members to complete a specific task. When in a virtual team, the tasks are huge in quantity and of different diversity, so defining roles in a team makes it easy for the group to undertake it effectively (Lane, Henry and Martha, 2014). In a virtual team, there are different departments and people working together for a goal. For a smooth way of processes, it is important to assign roles depending on the hierarchy and skills of a person. Mostly, virtual teams are made with people who have not worked together before, and managing such a group has its complications which are made easy by defining certain roles to everyone.
Communication
It is important to have a good level of communication in a team. Having different people in a group requires a great level of communication otherwise it will be a disrupt for a team. For example, in a virtual team there might be IT specialists, support executives, quality assurance personnel, and research executives. All these people work together to achieve a given task, and it is important to have a positive way of communication in the team in order to avoid any mistakes to accomplish a task (Lane, Henry and Martha, 2014).
Conflict resolution
The impact of conflicts on groups/teams is every complex, where a conflict can affect or help the performance of virtual teams or hurt it. In a virtual team, conflicts can arise from having different mindsets about a task to achieve, thinking that the person im communicating is some other person who was communicating with me before, or any conflict which can create problem for the group. Conflicts sometimes create obstacles for the team to achieve a task, and it usually harms the virtual group by delaying the time to meet those needs (Lane, Henry and Martha, 2014). It can usually come from a technical error or any person trying to solve any online situation and results in making an error.
Challenges in a virtual team
The most important challenges faced by the virtual teams are dispersed configuration and diverse composition. As virtual teams are mostly global and require a lot of potential from every individual, these challenges are to be catered by a team accordingly.
Dispered configuration requires a virtual team to have a team of indiviuals who are not affected by the different timezones of the world and different infrastructures of the country or the company (Hoch, Julia and Steve, 2014). The foremost challenge for a virtual team is to have a good base of their infrastructure, where the communication of a team is not effected by the different network systems. It means that having a bad way of communication like poor internet connection, poor network conditions makes a virtual team to have a bad communication and leads to negative results of the task, which the group is working on. Configuring dispersion in a global virtual team, also faces the challenge to overcome the legal, social, political, and economical conditions of the area (Hoch, Julia and Steve, 2014). For example, there a virtual team working from UK, USA, Australia, and Canada. There are people sitting in their countries and communicating over a network medium trying to work on a construction business plan. Every country having their legal standards have different laws regarding the construction business. So, the team has to make certain ways to overcome this legal issues in order to achieve the desired task.
This challenge becomes a problem when there is a lot of demand from the clients, and the team has to manage it processes to achieve the task in time. When a team is dispersed, it is important to have a strong coordination and precise process decisions (Hoch, Julia and Steve, 2014). It becomes a huge challenge for the virtual team to manage the people if there is not coordination set by the team. If the team is not organized, it becomes a problem for the team members to work in coordination and results in negative side for the team. In some cases, virtual groups work 24-hours a day and there are different peoples doing different time shifts (Hoch, Julia and Steve, 2014). If the information is not provided to each time shift, it will reduce the quality of the team and ultimately the efficiency of the team to produce results will decline. In a global virtual team setting, there are some implications and challenges which are important for the team to keep in mind, otherwise the challenge will become a threat to the operations of the team. Collaboration and coordination in a virtual team is most important as the networking teams require to have a high level of communication and coordination between the team members (Hoch, Julia and Steve, 2014).
Diverse composition in a virtual team setting, means that a team has different people based on their cultural, organizational, gender, nationality etc. These may be intended (envisioned by the company) or unintended (generally made). However, when a team performs as virtual team they need to make their focus on accepting the diversity in a team and how to manage that (Hoch, Julia and Steve, 2014). Different people from different countries, follow a different mindset and when put together in a team they need to have an open thinking to accept changes and differences. These differences in a virtual team includes language as the foremost challenge to be faced. A person interacting with a client on voice call, and the client speaks Spanish only. It will make the process slow if the team member does not know how to speak Spanish. Keeping in mind, about the cultures, every country has a different business culture. Some tend to have authority in a workplace, while some want to be given guidance about a task.
When forming a virtual team, the management needs to focus what type of people should be formed so that diversity can be observed in the team, and any future challenges are avoided. According to previous studies, people in a virtual team expects to have diversity regarding the tasks to perform and results to be delivered. If a team overcomes its cultural and language differences, it can create innovative and quality based results (Hoch, Julia and Steve, 2014). However, composing a diverse virtual team is often not possible in local cases, but in a global perspective it becomes easy for the company to make virtual groups because they have enough resources to back their task objectives. Having a less diverse virtual team, also makes the functioning of the team more difficult as the members are not capable of settling in to the processes in the organization of the team (Hoch, Julia and Steve, 2014). Based on these differences, the teams face challenges and try to overcome those challenges which can be of different nature.
The Triple Challenge
Based on the challenges of diverse composition and dispersed configuration, virtual teams face a collaborative challenge which is known as the triple challenge. Triple challenges include three differences i.e. invisibility, restricted channels, and complexity.
As there are more dynamics to cater, virtual teams are more complex to manage than the face-to-face interaction groups (Gilson et al., 2015). Virtual teams face the physical invisibility, as there is no physical interaction and every member is interating over the internet and network. There is no verbal communication in the team, and affects the whole organization of the virtual team. Apart from this, the team members also face the emotional and mental invisbility. It is increased by the the obstacles in the environment, where the members cannot talk to each other directly and creates different perceptions about others in the minds of the team members (Gilson et al., 2015). Also, the team is restriced to channels of technology, as there are limited amount of networks to communicate with each other. The language barrier comes into play, which effects the team as a whole, and in some cases it is difficult for the team to look into it. A person might think that it is difficult to communicate to the other members, in other countries as they might not know English and will restrict the team from performing well. It is also termed as a complexity, where the team finds it almost impossible to manage the processes in these circumstances. Complexity can be a culture difference, lack of technological skills in the members, and wrong association of team formulation (Gilson et al., 2015). Associating a team which has no collaboration, can have different complexities, where decisions might be made wrong and operations can be affected by it.
However, inability of visibility in the team creates hinderence to a lot of things which can create a big challenge for the team. Complexity of a virtual team can also be defined where the team is not sure about everyone being commited to the work and playing their role for the team (Gilson et al., 2015). In such situations, it is hard of the team to perform well and produce accurate results. As everyone is communicated over the network technology, it is impossible to analyze the commitment of every person in a group. Being not able to communicate physically to everyone, creates the problems of wrong identification of tasks, and as a result leads to wrong decisions.
Joys in a virtual team
Where there challenges, there are solutions to it as well. Virtual teams having the challenges, also have some positive things which make a good virtual team. By applying these factors in the team, it becomes easy for the team to accomplish tasks and produce great results (Wadsworth, Marla and Anita, 2015). Having a virtual business or team setup, reduces the costs of putting up offices, daily expenses and other incurred costs which are mandatory for a physical office setup. But, in virtual setting there is a less cost put up for the team and the budget it available to apply to other areas of the business (Wadsworth, Marla and Anita, 2015). It also increases the ability to hire more talented individual and there is a big talent pool to hire. In the modern world, every person loves to work in a home based setting and being in a virtual team provides the flexibility to work from anywhere a person wants to (Wadsworth, Marla and Anita, 2015). This also makes a team member more committed and motivated to work. In a office based team, there are more meetings being attended almost everyday which might reduce the time to produce results. But, in a virtual team, there are less meetings and the time is utilized by working on the specified task.
Most importantly, virtual setting enables more flexibility in the workforce. Being a virtual team means there are employees working on flexible hours that might be 24 hours a day. It creates flexibility in the team members to choose what ever time they seem fit to their need and ultimately increases the workforce of the team. It also opens up new markets and geographical areas to get into, while the cost remains the same. For a multinational, it might be a cost incurring method to open an office in an area which is far from the headquarters of the company. Virtual teams provides the method to enter new markets and setup a team based on the technology which allows the different people from different cultures to be a part of the team and ultimately enters new markets without heavy costs (Wadsworth, Marla and Anita, 2015). Virtual teams also improve the productivity of the task in hand, as the tasks are done with great care and it increased the overall profits of the firm. A company which runs solely on virtual networking or company making divisions for the virtual teams in their process (Wadsworth, Marla and Anita, 2015). In both cases, the profits are maximized because virtual groups focus on completing a task in time and on hand.
Virtuous cycles
Virtual teams focuses on creating a cycle of processes which helps in overcoming the challenges and risks to the team. There are three components of this cycle i.e. trust, shared knowledge, and ongoing communications. When at a starting point, teams start from a the basic understanding of the cycle, which is acquired or destroyed with the time (Wadsworth, Marla and Anita, 2015).
Shared knowledge
Most of the virtual teams, start from the initial stage of shared knowledge. At this stage the basic steps of the team processes are taken into consideration, to avoid any future risk or challenge. It maybe the agreement on the goals and tasks which each person needs to perform, which might be given from the description of each indiviual’s job. The knowledge of everyone’s contribution is declared to the team depending on the job titles of every individual. By implementing this step, it helps the team to have clarity that what every person needs to do and what are the skills needed to overcome it. Based on the diversity and dispersion taken in account by the team, every individual evalues that what knowledge is clearly instructed and which type of data is to be taken in account any cultural or disperse situations. Sharing the job roles and knowledge at the start of the team formulation, also helps in making good decisions and it also helps the overall profit to increase. With the phase of time, if the processes of the team are taken in the same way as they were from the start, the team acquires it has a business strategy and the operations of the virtual team are enhanced.
Trust
In every aspect of a business, trust and honesty are very important because a business cannot run on the basis of a lie. As discussed previously, virtual teams mostly rely on reliability. The team members try to give others benefit of the doubt, which is backed by trust from the members. Trusting the team members on completing a task, and any information that he/she wont leak it, is important in a virtual team. A collaboration amongst the members need to be developed to trust each other. Thus, building a trust factor in a team enhances the capability of the team to execute good results and make a consistency in the process of the tasks. Trust in a virtual team can also be defined, where a team member trusts the other one to take decisions on his/her behalf and values the priorities of the others. Building trust in a virtual team, eliminates alots of challenges and risks which might effect the team in the near future.
Ongoing communication
As a start point in a virtual team, communication is backed by the knowledge shared in the group and trust, which surpasses the communication process effectively. Being able to respond to emails, messages, queries, and errors by the team members that a high level of communication is observed at this point where the knowledge is shared on priority basis to the team. The communication in virtual setting can be the word files, powerpoint presentations, notes, query remarks, fax, emails, and any other source from which the work flow is enhanced. Being clear in communication requires depth knowledge of the topic and history of reliability within the team.
Conclusion
Virtual teams are a modern trend which are increasing everyday, and providing researchers more context to talk about. It is vital for every virtual group to eliminate the challenges coming in their success way, and to acquire any necessary tasks which can make the workflow more effective. Looking into the negative aspect of virtual teams will help in avoiding any things which are creating obstacles in the processes of the team and forming such a team which ultimately overcomes the risks associated with it. Thus, virtual teams needs to be considered as important aspect, as a new trend in the modern world of business.
References
Gilson, Lucy L., et al. “Virtual teams research: 10 years, 10 themes, and 10 opportunities.” Journal of Management 41.5 (2015): 1313-1337.
Hoch, Julia E., and Steve WJ Kozlowski. “Leading virtual teams: Hierarchical leadership, structural supports, and shared team leadership.” Journal of applied psychology 99.3 (2014): 390.
Lane, Henry W., and Martha L. Maznevski. International management behavior: Global and sustainable leadership. John Wiley & Sons, 2014.
Wadsworth, Marla B., and Anita L. Blanchard. “Influence tactics in virtual teams.” Computers in Human Behavior 44 (2015): 386-393.
