Virtuality and Team Performance: Understanding the Impact of Variety of Practices (original) (raw)

When does virtuality help or hinder teams? Core team characteristics as contingency factors

Human Resource Management Review, 2017

In this paper, we seek to encourage scholars to consider how reliance on technology-mediated communications can bring both promises and perils to team-based work structures. Specifically, we argue that a team's core characteristics (including skill differentiation, temporal stability, and authority differentiation) will differentially affect the challenges and opportunities presented by the team's reliance on virtual means of communication. First, we will discuss how varying degrees of each core characteristic can affect outcomes when teams rely on virtual communication. We then propose how configurations of the three characteristics and virtuality can enhance understanding in both research and practice. We advance propositions that we hope will serve as a starting point for scholarly discussion about how the literature on virtual teams can leverage the existing theories and knowledge on team structure and interdependencies.

Impacts of team virtuality on performance : a qualitative study

2000

Recent studies on virtual teams reveal that team virtuality varies in a continuum and may take different levels. Different levels of virtuality have considerable impacts on team processes and management as they imply several characteristics concerning communication dynamics and interaction styles, which change when shifting from one level to another. The purpose of this paper is to assess how the

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE ON FACTORS INFLUENCING VIRTUAL TEAMS -A MULTI LEVEL PRESPECTIVE

Journal of emergingtechnologiesand innovative research, 2019

Virtual teams are an emerging corporate trend in international companies worldwide.Heightened expectations of revenue gain demanded quick reactions to market and geographically scattered clientele of companies have forced organizations to restructure their way of working and out of these needs virtual teams are born. Teams that interact by using technologymediated communication devices and platforms are called Virtual teams. Employees operating in such a setting typically face geographical dispersion among team members various time zones different cultures and possibly a remote leader .Cost savings and enhances efficiency along with quick knowledge transfer and flexibility form the benefit base of virtual teams on the other hand issues are faced concerning communication trust, technology usage clarity of roles and processes motivation and team spirit .Leading virtual teams is demanding as these teams possess similar needs as conventional teams require additional efforts from the team head as face-to-face interaction with and among team members is rare. The paper helps to find the influencing factors for virtual team effectiveness. For the study four factors are been taken i.e., Leadershipstyle, Trust , communication and culture. The study reveals that there is a significant and positive relationship between the variables of study and virtual team performance.

Nurturing Team Performance by Managing Virtualness

Recent advancements in information and communication technologies have changed the way teams work by diminishing physical and temporal boundaries and have led to the birth of virtual teams. As the affordability of technological innovations increased, more and more work teams started opting for those technologies at various levels to manage their functions and communicate among themselves. Thus, it becomes very difficult to classify a team into a pure face-to-face or virtual team. Therefore management scholars have started seeing virtualness as a characteristic of every work team. In this context, based on an extensive review of research literature, the present article tries to understand the effect of virtualness on team performance and the factors which influence performance in virtual teams. We have also developed a model explaining the dynamics of the relationship between virtualness and team performance. We conclude by delineating ways to manage virtualness to improve performance in work teams.

How virtual are we? Measuring virtuality and understanding its impact in a global organization

2005

Abstract. Employees in global corporations are increasingly involved in 'virtual teams' on a regular basis. Conflicting definitions of virtuality make it hard to measure such things as how much virtual teaming occurs and how virtual teaming affects performance. As a consequence, it is hard to allocate funding and to design infrastructures and software to support this specific mode of working.

Virtual teams in organizations

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Organizations continue to widely adopt virtual teams as a primary way to structure work and the recent growth in utilization has outstripped theory and research on virtual teams. The explosive growth in virtual team use by organizations and the inherent challenges of virtual teams highlight the need for theory and research to inform organizations in designing, struc-turing and managing virtual teams. Therefore, the purpose of this special issue is to (a) advance theory and research on virtual teams, (b) offer new directions for research on the topic, and (c) contribute to efforts to enhance the effectiveness of virtual teams in organizations. Toward this end, in this introduction we provide a brief overview of virtual teams and present an input-process-output framework to contextualize and organize the eight papers appearing in this special issue. Virtual teams are work arrangements where team members are geographically dispersed, have limited face-to-face contact, and work interdependently through the use of electronic communication media to achieve common goals. Virtual teams connect knowledge workers together over time and distance to combine effort and achieve common goals (Bell & Kozlowski, 2002). Over the past several decades, there has been an explosive growth in organizations' use of virtual teams to organize work and this trend is expected to only continue in the future. For example, a recent survey of 1372 business respondents from 80 countries found that 85% of the respondents worked on virtual teams and 48% reported that over half their virtual team members were members of other cultures (RW 3 CultureWizard, 2016). The growth is attributable to factors including globalization, distributed expertise, organizations' need for rapid product development and innovation, and improved networking and collaboration technologies that support e-collaboration (Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson, & Jundt, 2005; Kozlowski & Bell, 2003; Mathieu, Maynard, Rapp, & Gilson, 2008). The use of virtual team structures holds great promise as virtual teams can do things collectively that collocated teams cannot. Some advantages of virtual teams include: the ability to assemble teams that maximize functional expertise by including professionals who are geographically dispersed, enabling continuous 24/7 productivity by using different time zones to their advantage, lowering costs by reducing travel, relocation and overhead, and sharing knowledge across geographic boundaries and organizational units and sites. In spite of the advantages of virtual teams, research has demonstrated that virtual teams present a number of challenges compared to co-located teams. Some disadvantages include communication and collaboration difficulties, low levels of media richness compared to co-located teams, potentially lower team engagement by team members, difficulties in creating trust and shared responsibility among team members, isolation, high levels of social distance between members, and challenges in monitoring and managing virtual teams.

Understanding virtuality in a global organization: toward a virtuality index

2003

We are getting more virtual all the time!" was a phrase frequently uttered during recent planning sessions for remote collaboration support at Intel Corporation; some form of this statement is no doubt made in other global firms as well. But what virtual comprises is not well understood. The construct of virtuality cannot be directly measured, so how virtual and how fast the stated change is occurring is mostly an enigma. Certain high level metrics of corporate information infrastructure can give indications, but much of virtuality is not obvious. The lack of definition makes it hard to understand the impact of virtual work on performance, or to evaluate the infrastructure and collaborative toolset needed to support distributed knowledge workers. Building on the concept of discontinuities, or factors contributing to a decrease in cohesion, we propose a virtuality index to assess the degree to which virtual work occurs and the pace at which this phenomenon progresses. The index was derived from data gathered in a study with sound psychometrics of over 1,200 employees at Intel Corporation. Preliminary analyses suggest that work predictability and general sociability (on or off teams), along with a range of media for expressivity and visualization can mitigate the consequences of working in discontinuous environments, while discontinuity of practices (e.g., more cultural and work process diversity) and worker mobility negatively impact the perception of team performance. Being distributed in and of itself was found to have no impact on team performance. These findings, along with others yet to be analyzed, promise to give us a handle on how the discontinuities of working virtually can be most effectively supported with collaboration tools.

Empirical Evidence on Factors Influencing Virtual Teams-A Multi

2019

Virtual teams are an emerging corporate trend in international companies worldwide.Heightened expectations of revenue gain demanded quick reactions to market and geographically scattered clientele of companies have forced organizations to restructure their way of working and out of these needs virtual teams are born. Teams that interact by using technology— mediated communication devices and platforms are called Virtual teams. Employees operating in such a setting typically face geographical dispersion among team members various time zones different cultures and possibly a remote leader .Cost savings and enhances efficiency along with quick knowledge transfer and flexibility form the benefit base of virtual teams on the other hand issues are faced concerning communication trust, technology usage clarity of roles and processes motivation and team spirit .Leading virtual teams is demanding as these teams possess similar needs as conventional teams require additional efforts from the t...

Analyzing Factors that Affect Performance of Global Virtual Teams

2007

Globalization of operations, reduced time to market, increased need to respond quickly to customers' needs worldwide and reduced cost of operations have encouraged many business organizations to adopt global virtual teams for their business activities. In this study, we explore a comprehensive model consisting of different variables that impact performance of such global virtual teams and validate it through an exploratory experiment conducted in an academic setting. Preliminary analysis indicates that trust between team members and communication effectiveness of the teams has significant positive correlation with the success of virtual team projects. Moreover, the participants perceived the virtual team project success positively. They also were positively oriented about their learning from participating in such virtual team projects. Motivation of team members is highly correlated with team members' learning effectiveness. Implications of these findings for businesses and curriculum development are discussed.