current technology: Six Major Challenges of Virtual Teams: Distance, Time, Technology ...

ISSUES SURROUNDING THE SIX CHALLENGES

Distance
Distance represents a challenge for virtual teams because it imposes limits on the face-to-face interaction that is important in building trust, monitoring performance, inspiring teamwork, maintaining cultural norms, and understanding cultural differences. That virtual teams do not share physical work space as traditional colocated teams do creates both obvious and subtle challenges. One of the main challenges is organization and team identification. Wiesenfeld, Raghuram, and Garud (1998) point out that over most of the past century, large corporations created mass production systems that required the congregation of employees at central places of work. Member identification, which refers to the strength of an individual?s cognitive attachment to the organization, is constructed and supported by cues that pull employees together. These elements include shared language, dress code, organizational norms, and organizational identifiers such as the office building, coworkers, and company logos. Member identification has been linked to employees? feelings of trust characterized by:
? Internalization of organizational norms and practices
? Desire to remain with the organization
? Willingness to cooperate with others
? Willingness to share knowledge

Information technology and the use of virtual teams enable a decentralization of work and make it possible for employees in some jobs to work together while being spatially and temporally separated. However, this freedom to work any time and anywhere may also weaken the bond between organizational members and their employer, possibly resulting in a reduction in employee commitment to the organization and job satisfaction.
Nevertheless, some virtual teams have been able to achieve high levels of interpersonal bonding. This personal connection among team members has been described as a family-like feeling that goes beyond common goals and commitment to the work, resulting in knowing and appreciating that team members are also committed to and care for one another. This connection can be strengthened through a variety of techniques, including face-to-face get-togethers, electronically sharing humorous stories or incidents, creating playful games to build and maintain team identity, taking the time to show personal interest in one another (by electronically passing along information they thought other team members might be interested in), sharing personal issues and crises with other team members, and functioning as a support network for one another.
Members of virtual teams are also susceptible to the perils of not having member identification with each other. It is much more challenging to build rapport, trust, group norms, and work protocols when not working in a face-to-face setting. Communication is more of a challenge, and team members must be more diligent and disciplined about keeping in touch and sharing information with the rest of the team, since it does not happen automatically as it often does in shared physical space.
On an individual level, there is also a concern that an employee working off-site on his or her own may begin to feel isolated. This may result in a loss of productivity, lower organizational commitment, loneliness, and feelings of vulnerability as a result of feeling out of the loop, although research results are only beginning to confirm these assertions.

Time
Virtual teams are simultaneously more and less bound than traditional face-to-face teams by the restrictions of time. Time differences create advantages and disadvantages. It is extremely challenging to schedule meetings and coordinate a globally dispersed team. However, one advantage of time differences is that a twenty-four-hour workday may be created as members of the team hand work off at the end of their day to members located around the globe who are just beginning their workday. In fact, teams can hand off work in progress literally around the clock among the three main economic centers?the United States, Europe, and Asia?which can shorten project time by having near around-the-clock progress.
For projects that require real-time collaboration, time differences can be problematic. As an example, consider a team made up of members from the United Kingdom and the Pacific Northwest in the United States. There is an eight-hour time difference between the two sites. In this example, just as the U.S. team members are arriving at work, the U.K. team members are wrapping up their workday. Therefore, in order to collaborate in a synchronous fashion, one group or the other must work outside normal work hours. Questions that require the other group?s guidance may have to wait several hours to be answered.
As a result, decisions may take longer to be made. The common solution to this problem is for the team to adopt a ?call anytime? policy: every attempt is made not to contact a team member outside his or her working hours, but if an answer is vital to the project, contact at any time is allowed. This creates a twenty-four-hour workday in a different sense than was used earlier. In this version, an employee may struggle to maintain a good work/life balance where around-the-clock demands of work gradually erode the quality of both work and nonwork experience. Attitudes differ among cultures and individuals regarding work outside normal office hours and can create tension among members of a team. And even without drastic time differences, it can be difficult to coordinate schedules, tasks, and meeting times when a team is virtual.

Technology
The vast majority of virtual team communication is carried out with the assistance of technology, which creates its own set of challenges: employees must learn the technology before they can begin to use it for collaboration. Getting members comfortable with this type of interaction with coworkers can be difficult. There is also the additional challenge of getting team members up to needed skill levels in using communication technology, which includes both knowing how to operate the technology and also when it is appropriate to use different types of technology for different purposes. This is often referred to as matching technology and task.
Interorganizational virtual teams (virtual teams made up of members from different organizations) often have the added problem of incompatible technology platforms and communication tools. Technology incompatibilities can also contribute to trust and security issues that can arise on interorganizational teams. These arrangements require team members to act outside their traditional comfort zones by trusting information to individuals who in other situations would be competitors.
Some, however, have suggested that collaborative technology enables both virtual team functioning and organizational learning: technology is less important than the techniques virtual teams have developed to interact, such as communication and group norms, appropriate virtual team leadership styles and structures, regularly scheduled meetings, and occasional face-to-face meetings.

Culture
The way a team functions is often directly related to the culture of the organization, but challenges in teams can also come about as a result of national cultural differences. For example, it has been shown that teams in the United States value the individual, whereas Japanese teams place more emphasis on the capabilities of a group as a whole. There may also be regional differences, generational differences, departmental or functional differences, and, in the case of interorganizational virtual teams, organizational differences. There may be differences in management styles across cultures and nations that affect members of the same virtual team in different ways. For example, a worker from one culture may find the management style of a team leader objectionable even though the members from other cultures are not bothered by the same behavior. Cultural differences increase with virtual work because more boundaries are crossed as a result of the team members? being embedded in different cultures. Adding to the complexity is the fact that the team creates its own additional culture, which can be deliberately developed to transcend the embedding problem.

Trust
Teamwork always depends on trust. When members are colocated, trust may be easier to develop because of the informal, spontaneous interactions that can occur between meetings to develop confidence in each other. Virtual teams depend on trust but find it more difficult to develop. Trust and identity, a basic familiarity with a person based on interaction or time spent together, are crucial elements for the effective formation and functioning of virtual teams. Identity plays a crucial role in communication because knowledge of those with whom one works and communicates is necessary for understanding and interpreting interaction styles. However, when people are separated by distance and time, identity tends to be ambiguous at best because many of the fundamental cues about personality and social roles are absent. These cues are typically gained through experience, history, and face-to-face interaction with a person. Trust is based on knowing and being known by one another, and the absence of routine interaction, nonverbal indicators, and informal social time can result in a lack of trust and misperceptions that lead to less than successful project results.
Trust may develop more slowly among virtual team members as compared to face-to-face team members. With less visual contact, it may simply take longer to identify and adjust to the habits, quirks, and skills of team members. Unfortunately, mistrust is likely, as employees from different locations, cultures, and technical backgrounds are likely to question how the information they offer will be used, whether their contribution will be recognized outside the team, and whether other team members will make an equal contribution to the work.
Teams possessing sufficient levels of trust can build strong relationships that make it possible to have disagreements over content or information and yet continue to work together successfully. When trust is absent, individuals are more prone to be tense and uncertain because the position they take may determine whether they are accepted by the group. As a result, collaboration suffers.
Teams initially develop trust based on social communication. Action-based trust emerges after the team has worked together for a while. Face-to-face meetings foster social-based trust, which can carry over into the electronic space. Once a team has started computer-mediated working, the role of action-based trust needs to be considered and maximized. Communication is a key element of trust. Regular and frequent communication fosters and sustains trust, while trust tends to deteriorate in relation to decreasing levels of communication. Trust is related to the frequency and quality of communication. Generally the more communication there is, the greater the trust. Teams that have high levels of trust among members tend not only to perform better but rate the working arrangement as a more positive and satisfying experience.
Trust in virtual teams, while built slowly, can be developed from positive, ongoing experiences among members of the team; from members believing in the individual expertise of one another; and, perhaps most important, from a sense of accountability, that is, from seeing that others follow through on what they agree to do. This means that a key to virtual team success is members? keeping their commitments to each other and therefore making only commitments they can and will keep.

Leadership
Virtual team leaders operate in different conditions than leaders of traditional colocated teams. They are often called on to play both a team member and leader role simultaneously, and they may be part of more than one virtual team, with a leadership role in one and a member role in another. When in the leader role, these virtual team leaders face special challenges: they need to ensure quality performance of team members and mentor and coach team members, all from afar. These new competencies include technological proficiency and appropriate use of technology, cross-cultural management skills, ability to coach distant team members, ability to build trust among dispersed team members, networking with others outside the team such as customers or other stakeholders, and remote project management skills.
Researchers have found that effective virtual team leaders need to perform multiple leadership roles simultaneously. Fisher and Fisher (2001) suggest that virtual team leaders need to assume six different roles, which are indicative of effective leadership in brick-and-mortar settings as well:
? Living example: Serve as a role model of effective virtual teaming
? Coach: Help team members develop their own potential and ensure accountability in others
? Business analyzer: Translate changes in the business environment into opportunities for the organization
? Barrier buster: Open doors and run interference for the team
? Facilitator: Bring together necessary tools, information, and resources for the team to get the job done
? Results catalyst: Help the team improve performance and achieve good results
Highly effective virtual team leaders are mentors and exhibit a high degree of understanding (empathy) toward their team members. At the same time, they are able to assert their authority without being perceived as overbearing or inflexible.

Furthermore, they are adept at providing regular, detailed, and prompt communication with their peers and in articulating role relationships (responsibilities) among the virtual team members.
Virtual team leaders do not control others; rather, they coach individuals in remote locations on how to control themselves. As a result, the leadership structures (different types of leadership forms) that they depend on may vary. Leadership structures that virtual teams use range from permanent leaders, to rotating leaders, to either a leaderless structure or one assisted by a facilitator or coordinator. Leadership structures may not remain constant throughout the team?s life cycle. Virtual team leaders need to be able to function in all of these different types of structures.