Dana Jarvis - 7 Essentials For Managing Virtual Teams

7 Essentials for Managing Virtual Teams

By Dana Jarvis

Duquesne University

Bassim Hamadeh, CEO and Publisher

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Jamie Giganti, Senior Managing Editor

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Berenice Quirino, Associate Editor

Copyright 2018 by Dana E. Jarvis. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information retrieval system without the written permission of Cognella, Inc. For inquiries regarding permissions, translations, foreign rights, audio rights, and any other forms of reproduction, please contact the Cognella Licensing Department at rights@cognella.com.

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Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-1-5165-2348-1 (ebk) / 978-1-5165-1859-3 (pbk)

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to Mom, Dad, Michelle, Sydney and Gavin.

I love you always and forever, to infinity and beyond.

Introduction

Virtual reality, virtual space, virtual organizations, virtual teams; the word virtual is todays organizational buzzword. Virtual is there but not there, and this is exactly what Alice experienced with the Cheshire Cat in Wonderland. So, the virtual world really is not as new an idea as some of us might have thought. One of the fastest-growing, high-tech office trends today is virtual teams. These teams cross time, space, and cultural boundaries and do so effectively with the use of technology. When Marshall McLuhan forecasted the global village in the 1960s, he was, in fact, speaking of the virtual workplace (Johnson, Heimann and ONeill, 2001, p.24). Today, a Google search of virtual teams yields 704,000,000 results. It is amazing to think about how far we have come in developing and deploying virtual teams. In many ways, virtual teams have become a major part of our organizational landscape.

Prasad and Akhilesh (2002) in their research share that:

It no longer matters to Microsoft if some of its product designers are sitting in one part of the USA, its product development engineers in a different part and product test engineers in some other part of the world, for example China or India. Texas Instruments has offices spread across the world (including the USA and India) and interestingly, some of the teams, irrespective of their location, use the same computing infrastructure like servers and development tools. With the time differences of as high as 12 hours in some cases, when one team is probably leaving office for home, the other teams are just coming in, thus leading to high resource utilization. Similar is the case with Motorola, where the multiple teams are working together from different parts of the globe on a single product. Organizations are excited by the fact that they no longer need to co-locate big teams. Microsoft, Texas Instruments and Motorola are just examples. Looking around, it is not difficult to see a majority of the multi-national organizations operating such teams with product design, development, test centers distributed around the globe, Philips, Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, GE, DaimlerChrysler, Oracle and Digital Equipment just to name a few (pp. 102-103).

Based on the research, there are a number of significant reasons for companies choosing to have virtual teams. Johnson, Heimann and ONeill (2001) provide a concise list of benefits associated with the benefits of virtual teams. These include:

* Allows flexible hours so employees can spend more time with family. Nearly 75 percent of teleworkers responding to an AT&T survey last year said that they were more satisfied with their personal and family lives [now] than before they started working (Baig and Dunkin, 1998).

* Creates and disperses improved business processes across organizations.

* Supports cross-functional and cross-divisional interaction.

* Saves time and money in the daily transportation to and from work.

* Reduces pollution. If 10 percent of the US workforce telecommuted one day a week, the population would avoid the frustration of driving 24.4 million miles, would breathe air with 12,963 tons less air pollution, and would conserve more than 1.2 million gallons of fuel each week (Langhoff, 1999).

* Changes from a production-oriented company to a service/ information-oriented company (Baig and Dunkin, 1998).

* Helps physically challenged people who could not work in a traditional environment be crucial members of companies via telecommunications (Gould, 1999).

* Reduces restrictions on working hours.

* Requires less office and parking space.

* Reduces costs of heat and electricity (pp. 25-26).

Clearly, there is a need for virtual teams within our expanding global economy. In order to build on the concept of a virtual team, it is first necessary to outline characteristics of high performing teams versus those that are not. What are the characteristics of a high impact team? Why do some teams fail to meet their goals? In what ways are these types of teams similar and different? These are the driving questions required to spark our virtual team to greatness. Greatness can be measured in the team serving as a legacy for those behind them. An example is the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers football dynasty.

Growing up in Pittsburgh, PA, we are taught early on that the Pittsburgh Steelers are a part of our lifestyle, community and identity as a city. In the 1970s, Head Coach Chuck Noll proved himself to be a no nonsense type of leader. Under his direction, the Steelers won 4 Super Bowls. No other team at that time had ever won as many Super Bowls. One of the defining characteristics of the team was a strong work ethic in which Coach Noll would do his part and the team would do their part. Noll once said, The key to a winning season is focusing on one opponent at a time. Winning one week at a time. Never look back and never look ahead. Underlying his words is the realization that it took the entire team to work as a cohesive group to win an unbelievable 4 Super Bowls in the 1970s. These are defining moments of greatness that have served as a legacy for teams who have followed.

Upon further analysis of Super Bowl Championship teams like the Pittsburgh Steelers, a number of high performing characteristics emerge. These are matched by low performing teams exemplified by a failure to develop goals, failure to execute on goals and failure to learn lessons. A model of Team Dynamics is noted below.