Building Virtual Teams in Wake of Emerging Remote-Working culture (original) (raw)
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This article explores the evolution of remote work, analyzing the strategies for effective virtual team management and collaboration. The discussion encompasses factors driving the rise of remote work, such as technological advancements, globalization, changing workforce demographics, pandemics, and corporate cost savings. The article also examines the challenges of remote work and virtual team management, including communication barriers, building trust, time zone differences, and ensuring accountability and productivity. Additionally, the article delves into strategies for effective virtual team management, collaboration techniques, case studies of successful remote work implementation, and future trends in remote work, such as artificial intelligence, the gig economy, and hybrid work models. The conclusion emphasizes the need for continuous adaptation and learning as remote work continues to evolve, transforming the way organizations operate, manage teams, and collaborate across distances.
WORK TOGETHER… WHEN APART CHALLENGES AND WHAT IS NEED FOR EFFECTIVE VIRTUAL TEAMS
Increasingly competitive global markets and accelerating technological changes have increased the need for people to contact via electronic medium to have daily updates, the people those who could not able to meet face to face every day. Those who contact via electronic medium i.e. Virtual Team, are having number of benefit but to achieve these potential benefits, however, leaders need to overcome liabilities inherent in the lack of direct contact among team members and managers. Team members may not naturally know how to interact effectively across space and time. By this paper author try to throw some lights on the challenges that virtual team faces and try to elaborate what is needed for Virtual Team.
Working in Virtual Teams: A Systematic Literature Review and a Bibliometric Analysis
IEEE Access, 2020
Modern developments in technology have changed the way we socialize, communicate and work. Globalization, Information and Communication Technologies, digital culture and the increase in the amount of technology available for online communication mean that more organizations are implementing virtual teams. The growth in the use of virtual teams in organizations has incited researchers to investigate the different aspects, factors and challenges of these teams. This article uses a systematic literature review and a bibliometric analysis of virtual teams to identify the most relevant articles on the subject. These articles are then thoroughly reviewed and finally, a summary is made of all the research published over a five-year period. The systematic review of literature proposed by Ramey and Rao [1] and enhanced by Pulsiri and Thesenvitz [2] was used to examine the Scopus and Web of Science databases to identify the theories, research problems, research methodologies and results of 2354 studies on virtual teams published between 2015 and 2019. The main topics of the existing research in the field are reviewed, and the main limitations, problems and existing gaps in research are presented. INDEX TERMS Systematic literature review, bibliometric analysis, COVID-19, thematic analysis, virtual teams. I. INTRODUCTION Crises, wars, disasters and epidemics have triggered or accelerated changes in all types of activities, including the ways we live and work. Currently, the COVID-19 outbreak is a global health challenge. Health authorities suggest that ''it is time for businesses, hospitals, schools and citizens to start preparing''. Many companies have chosen to reduce risks by using remote working or working from home to prevent employees from being in close contact and spreading the virus [3]. Globalization, improvements in information and communication technologies (ICTs), the increase in the number of remote workers and the emergence of computer-mediated groups, have led to changes in how workers communicate and collaborate in organizations. With current technological advances, the knowledge economy and digital culture, The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Jenny Mahoney. new ways of working are appearing in organizations. This study investigates the type known as virtual teams [4]. For this new type of working groups, the physical limits of distance or differences in time-zone are no longer relevant. Other characteristics of teamwork have become more important when working remotely, such as communication, trust, task characteristics, leadership, cohesion and empowerment, all of which have an impact on a team's performance [5], [6]. However, the number and range of publications available on virtual teams can cause confusion if there is no effective and systematic process for classifying and associating the ideas in them. In addition, advances in information and communication technology means that information is transmitted around the world much faster and this has encouraged academic researchers to produce even more publications and therefore add to the confusion [2]. This excess of information and the confusion caused by it makes a systematic review of the existing literature necessary. The main objective was to find the most important articles
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.
Team building in organizations working remotely during the COVID-19 Pandemic
International Journal of Latest Research in Humanities and Social Science (IJLRHSS) Volume 04 - Issue 09, 2021 www.ijlrhss.com || PP. 01-05, 2021
When a member of a common group faces a common crisis, it pushes them to get through it together. But, working together in remoteness, caused by this COVID-19 crisis, is a very challenging setup. If the expectation is to stay competent and work in one's full potentiality despite the demands of this pandemic situation, then this necessitates a proactive approach to nurture every member's holistic well-being. To intervene, modified and digitalized team building processes were found feasible by some organizations. This paper shows the contrast between the conventional team-building strategies, and that of the New Normal teambuilding that is appropriated to the work-from-home setup. Promising practices are also mentioned; which organizations may find helpful to implement in their respective groups. Future qualitative researches can be conducted to describe the impacts of the New Normal mode of team building.
Managing geographically dispersed teams: from temporary to permanent global virtual teams
Built and Natural Environment …, 2012
The rise and spread of information communication technologies (ICT) has enabled increasing use of geographically dispersed work teams (Global Virtual Teams). Originally, Global Virtual Teams were mainly organised into temporary projects. Little research has focused on the emergent challenge for organisations to move towards establishing permanent Global Virtual Teams in order to leverage knowledge sharing and cooperation across distance. To close this gap, this paper will set the scene for a research project investigating the changed preconditions for organisations. As daily face-to-face communication is not the basis for developing manager-subordinate, as well as member-member relations, the development of teams to work together efficiently and effectively in a virtual setting has often been neglected. Part of this discussion are the changed parameters in relation to increasing global competition; a new generation of self-lead digital natives, who are already practising virtual relationships and a new approach to work, and currently joining the global workforce; and improved communication technologies.
Virtuality and teams: Dealing with crises and catastrophes
Human Systems Management
BACKGROUND: This article bridges the gap between theory and practice and elaborates, for practitioners, how to convert the COVID-19 and other similar crises into opportunities for keeping their business on track for growth. It shows how movement to virtual modes of working, especially virtual teams, can help practitioners meet the current crisis effectively and also prepare for future crisis efficiently. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this article is to show how the concept of virtuality can help design practices which enable managers/practitioners in effectively managing necessary transitions to virtual work. METHODS: The article reviews and integrates essential literature on virtuality and virtual teams. It enumerates the benefits and challenges which accompany a sudden and necessary movement to virtual work in teams. Also used are the recently developed theoretical frameworks of teams as essential emergent states and its implications on virtual work. RESULTS: By distilling insights ...