With virtual teams leading the way to the future, developing virtual leadership skills of team leaders is a key challenge. The ingenuity of the manager is vital in inspiring such teams
With the upsurge of globalisation, highly distributed workforces, rising cost of travel and constantly improving telecommunications, work culture of organisations has seen a drastic change and virtual teams, that are spread across time, space, and culture, have become the new normal. Several studies across the globe have found out that virtual teams are on the rise.
According to Virtual Teams Survey Report by RW3, 85 per cent of respondents say that virtual team work is extremely or somewhat critical to their job; 41 per cent report that their teams never meet in person; 20 per cent of respondents spend over half of the day interacting on virtual teams; and 22 per cent of respondents received training to increase productivity on virtual teams
Organisations are much likely to perform well when their people work effectively as a team. Teams are building blocks of an organisation and create synergy where the combined effect of various skills, talents and perspectives of the team is greater than the sum of individual efforts and can help achieve corporate goals. It enables mutual support and learning and can generate a sense of belonging and commitment.
Although in the past, teams were co-located with high level of interdependence, they are more geographically dispersed now with different cultural backgrounds, languages and value systems. Depending on the geographical distribution, duration of the project, objective and role of members, virtual teams can be of different types. Goods companies team up their sales, marketing, manufacturing and R&D professionals, work at different locations in parallel virtual teams, to make recommendations for the adaptation of product specifications.
The coming together of subject matter experts from different parts of the globe to create a product development team with specific and measurable deliverables is another example of a virtual team. Whirlpool brought together a team of experts from the US, Brazil and Italy for two years to develop a chlorofluorocarbon-free refrigerator.
Similarly, service virtual teams have members across different time zones. NASA is an example of an action team which is actually an ad-hoc team formed for a very short duration of time. When companies outsource portions of their software development work to a low-cost global location like India, Philippines and so on, they form offshore virtual teams.
A survey by researchers Siebdrat, Hoegl and Ernst some years back, in fact, found that with appropriate processes in place, virtual teams can significantly outperform their co-located counterparts.
We are looking at the rise of e-leaders who lead entire projects from a distance and e-leadership reflects a new working environment where human interactions are mediated by information and communication technology.
With virtual teams definitely leading the way to the future, the adequacy of virtual leadership skills of team leaders is a challenge along with other factors like trust creation and maintenance, distance and time-related issues, and problems arising from cultural differences and diversity. Mutual trust plays a key role in successful international alliances and it is highly important in virtual teams that face uncertainty and have incomplete knowledge of all other group members.
Consequently, trust is seen as more critical in virtual environments than in traditional team setting and an e-leader’s role is very important in creating trust among the team members by creating a strategy to communicate and showcase each member’s contribution and achievements and giving a constant feedback. Communication is another challenge in virtual teams as it is asynchronous information and allows for multiple themes of conversation to occur simultaneously from multiple contributors, leading to misunderstandings and information diffusion. It lacks nonverbal (visual) and paraverbal (auditory) cues that can lead to feelings of isolation among virtual employees.
This feeling can, however, be reduced and contribution to team decision making and innovation, can be increased, when an e-leader has a strong one-to-one relationship with his virtual team members.
Distance is typically considered to be one of the key challenges faced by e-leaders while managing virtual employees. Distance in working relationships can be physical when produced by geography, time zone or organisational size; operational when related to team size as well as to opportunities for communication and face-to-face meetings or cultural, based on different values, prior familiarity, and status. Diversity in virtual teams manifested by factors such as national culture, location, different communication practices and values is one of the greatest challenges to overcome by any e-leader.
They have to take into account and enact diversity in virtual teams by promoting team-building, responding to specific needs of different team members by learning how to handle people from different cultures, and by applying user-friendly technology to enhance closeness between the diversified team members, and above all, convert diversity-related challenges into opportunities, are instrumental in creating value and contributing to organisational success.
Although many virtual teams have failed, as it is very difficult to build trust, manage accountability and form bonds among teams separated by physical distance, there are several large companies who have got the collaboration among their virtual teams right. For example, SAP SE with 30,000 employees in 60 countries, is the world’s largest inter-enterprise software company and virtual team cooperation and coordination is critical to the company’s success. SAP is headquartered in Germany with strategic large R&D centres based in India, Israel, China and the US, each having expertise in a specific area, allowing managers to assemble virtual teams that include members from each of these speciality groups.
SAP SE has also enhanced its virtual team performance by creating an ongoing team-building initiative in which teams worked together to build a community through a blend of online learning, conference calls, briefings, and coaching sessions. IBM, which employs more than 200,000 people from different countries and backgrounds, manages time zones effectively by using Results Oriented Work Environment (ROWE), a collaborative software, that allows employees to work at the hours when they are naturally most productive and at the same time help build trust and enhance communication among team members. With a workforce of 90,000 employees throughout the world, General Electric trained its virtual leaders to address cultural differences, an important aspect of effective virtual leadership training in a global setting.
On the other side, erstwhile Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer pulled back the virtual teams and banned telecommuting at Yahoo shortly after she took over in 2013 and was one of the most visible leaders to move away from this practice. Similarly, other companies like Aetna, Bank of America, and Reddit have cut back on virtual teams. With an increasing globalisation, virtual teams are here to stay and would grow in future. It depends on the ingenuity of the manager to lead such teams. An e-leader can effectively lead his virtual team first and foremost by being available, defining work systems, establishing multiple communication tools, scheduling regular meetings, choosing video calls over other communication methods and encouraging informal conversations, creating a professional work environment, establishing a meritocratic system, and prioritising cultural sensitivity.
These policies would go a long way in making virtual teams work and contribute to the success of organisations.
(The writer is Assistant Professor, Amity University)