Virtual Team Challenges

Virtual teams exist in organizations as a reaction to globalization and increasing competition. Technological advances has started and enhanced the quality of virtual teams, it became easier for geographically scattered individuals to communicative, interact and collaborate between each other to achieve a single goal. In education industry, many universities started to offer online education or distant learning experience that utilizes technology to allow instructor who could be located anywhere in the globe to teach students from different continents, with different cultures and backgrounds. The education experience in such environment requires students to collaborate and work in virtual teams to work on a single challenging project with strict deadlines and clear requirements. In this article I will be discussing the challenges classroom virtual teams face while working on academic project, and how to overcome those challenges.

The classroom virtual group consists of geographically dispersed students who interact and collaborate using a mixture of telecommunication and information technology tools to deliver a project. This group is similar to on campus classroom project groups who interact for the same purpose, yet they don’t do face-to-face communication, “they operate across space, time, culture and organizational boundaries” (Shin, 2005). Four dimensions categorize virtual teams, and those dimensions are spatial, cultural, temporal and organizational dispersion as explained by Shin (Shin, 2005), spatial dispersion refers to the degree the team is dislocated across geographical locations, where temporal dispersion refers to the extent the team operate at different ties. The cultural dispersion relates to the degree the team is formed from individuals with different cultures, backgrounds and origin. The forth dimension, which is organizational dispersion relates to the extent individuals works across organizational boundaries (Shin, 2005). Each of these dimensions by itself creates a level of conflict that could result in affecting the performance of the project, as well as motivation of team members. Team members could be faced by build, maintain and lack of trust issues, this could be caused by lack of communication and misinterpretation of actions based on cultural perspectives. To overcome this challenge I will be focusing on identifying flexible communication tools to be used, and use those tools to get to know other team members in a personal level as long as its accepted based on their culture. I my previous modules, our main communication tool place over Skype, personal emails and blackboard discussion board. We shared our Skype ID’s and personal emails since day one, this helped us to overcome the limitation of group chat offered by blackboard as we could reach each other more easily and have a real time conversation most of the time. In some cultures like the one I belong to, it is more appropriate to start any conversation by personal chat such as insuring the member health is fine, and that he is happy and then start with the professional conversation, while in other cultures this is not acceptable and may be interpreted as lack of professionalism and time wasting conversation. Based on other team members cultures and interpretation I would start some personal talk with them to increase the level of trust, and synergy at the same time. Creating team synergy is sometimes difficult in virtual teams due to lack of frequent communication, and this could be achieved by frequent more communication. As well before the meeting I usually and will be doing one-to-one small meeting, the purpose of this is to increase the level of trust as trusted team members will be more interactive and come with healthy challenging ideas, as well to insure that each team member understands the full picture of each weeks project work. To build and maintain team synergy I will communicate each week’s project task to all team members to insure that all team members are aligned, as some team members come to the meeting without previous preparations and could not have read the requirements ahead. After the meeting I will insure that MOM are communicated and posted in the group’s discussion board. Isolation could happen when team members feel ignored, isolated and not appreciated. To overcome this I will insure that each team member is listened to, his/her ideas appreciated, and discussed. As well each team member will have to discuss and help other team members in their tasks, at the end the project is a collaborative work that is build based on other team members work, It should not be treated as hand in assignments. Performance assessment is a crucial issue in classroom virtual teams, however since this is a gradable project, and each member’s grades are and should stay confidential, I will insure that each member’s weekly task is revised by all team members and commented on if necessary. Each work should include academic references, properly cited and relevant.

Team members should understand they come from different cultural backgrounds, and I will encourage each team member to have a second look at other team members BIO, this will help in managing expectations and understanding other members cultural background. It is important to form a group with similar or almost similar time zone; this will ease the communication, and help in having online conversations. However, it is not easy to maintain that because members could be from different time zones, and in such case I will insure that meeting are set at appropriate time for each team member. As well to motivate all team members, leadership will take a rotation shape every week, leader will be responsible for updating group discussion board, consolidating team member’s tasks and steer the meetings. As well the leader should insure that weekly tasks are equally distributed among team members to avoid frustration and demotivation.

In conclusion, classroom virtual teams will face the challenges faced by virtual teams of multinational organizations, conflicts based on interpretation and lack of cultural differences understanding could occur. It is important to insure high level of dedication to the group project by team members, and variety of telecommunication and information technology tools should be used to increase level of trust and team synergy.

Reference:

Buchanan, David A., & Huczynski, Andrzeg A. (2010). Organizational Behaviour. Prentice Hall.

Hall, Patrick & Fernandez-Ramil, Juan. (2007) Managing the Software Enterprise, Software Engineering and Information Systems in Context. London:Thomson Learning.

YUHYUNG SHIN, Conflict Resolution in Virtual Teams, Organizational Dynamics, Volume 34, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 331-345, ISSN 0090-2616, 10.1016/j.orgdyn.2005.08.002. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0090261605000392)