Individual’s self reflection
Introduction
Nowadays, as the interactions among the
whole world are becoming increasingly frequent and important, virtual teams are
requesting in almost every organization. Besides, as the development of
communication technologies, such as telephone, emails, MSN, Skype, Web cams,
etc, which enable remote communication, virtual teams are emerging and become
necessary in organizations. I am very glad to have a virtual team experience in
this course and the virtual way of communication, I think, will be inevitable
or even the theme when I go to work. On the whole, we have a very pleasant
virtual team, though experience some cloudy days.
The starting stage of the virtual team
My reflection starts with the team setting
up stage. At this stage, we first selected teammates to form the “morning class
team”. It was a tricky process because everyone in the class wanted to grab the
best teammates. After a battle, we formed out DIB group, which was consisted of
a passionate and minded leader (Eric), an excellent executor (Shadow) and an
attentive coordinator (me). At the very beginning, we reached an agreement on
our roles and on what each of us was accountable for. Besides, although we had
very different roles, things we all had was the enthusiasm about the work and
we were all self-motivated. These common characteristics enhanced our team
effectiveness according to LaBrosse. (Sadri, 2012) Though we were not the
best personally, our collaboration was the best. We chose a good team leader
with good communication skills, who had very clear ideas about what we were
doing. Furthermore, as we were friends and trusted each other before we became
teammates, the communication in our team was very open and smoothly.
Although what I talked above was not the virtual team, this real team laid a
good foundation for the virtual team we would soon form. Actually, the virtual
team was not established by us but formed by our professor randomly with one
team from the evening class, which, I believe, is what things should usually be
in the real work. In this virtual team, although we did not have the specific
roles, we agreed two spokesmen after a short time of chaos at the beginning of
communication when there were too many opinions that made the communication
inefficient. They were Mandy from the other team and me. Both of us were
responsible for collecting the ideas from our own real teams and then,
exchanged them to make the progresses toward the mutual project.
Communication channels
One thing I would
like to highlight was that until the end of the final projects, we had never
talked to the other team members face-to-face. The major ways we communicated
were Email and Whatsapp. We used Email to summarize our ideas and received
feedbacks from the other team. By using the clear and summarized expressions,
the communication efficiency improved. In addition, it was easy to document the
ideas and opinions from the two teams so that when there was any confusion, we
could trace back at the first place. According to virtual team survey report in
2012, most of people who took the survey claimed that they used Email as the
major communication tool in virtual teams. (showed as follows)
However, there were still some bad
effects of communicating through E-mail. Firstly, it was hard to get
timely feedback, especially for those who did not check the emails constantly.
So when there was something urgent, we would not get the feedback in the first
place. Besides, when there was a conflict, the untimely feedback aggravated
misunderstandings. I still remembered one time we had very different ideas
about our project topic, but our team waited for a while to receive the other
team’s reply which made us could not stop thinking whether the other team was
mad about our team’s idea and we could not move forward until they replied.
Secondly, communicating by emails reduced the social cues. E-mail communication
lacks the emotional expression found in face-to-face conversations (Johnson,
2002). For example, by relying on the messages' cognitive content, some writing
mistakes or inappropriate expressions would lead to unnecessary
misunderstanding and conflicts. Lastly, lengthy e-mail message could be hard to
be digested and understand. For example, as we would like to make our email
message comprehensive, our email messages were very long and sometimes we found
that the other team missed some parts of it. It was upsetting if we had a
conflict. Lastly, as the reviewability of the E-mail message, some mistakes
would be kept, which needed us to be very careful about the contents we sent.
During the project, we received an email with very straight and angry
expressions, although we passed the conflict away, we still were bothered by
those angry words when we saw that email. Because of those disadvantages of
emails, we used Whats app at the same time. For example, if we had something
urgent or complicated to discuss, we organized a meeting on Whats app, and
then, summarized the ideas in emails.
Challenges faced by the virtual team
The second reflection I would like to make
is about challenges we faced in the virtual team. The first one is lack of
leadership. As the lack of face-to-face communication, it was hard for a
virtual team to appoint a trusted leader who could establish ground rules,
build trust among team members, model appropriate communication, empower the
team and address conflicts effectively, which would determine the success or
failure of the team. Our virtual team didn’t have an appointed leader, although
the two real teams both had their leaders. So it was hard for us to reach an
agreement when we had diverse views. Take the determination of the two business
partner of our virtual organization for example, we decided to establish the
virtual company www.roomsharing.com at the very beginning,
but it took us two weeks to choose IBIS hotel and www.backpackers.com.tw ,
because every team was insisting on its own choice and could not convince each
other. Finally, when everyone had enough of the arguments, Andy from the
evening class team stood out and sent us a final email about the different
choices. By using the framework he suggested, we finally reached an agreement
on the two partners. At that time, Andy played the role of the leader.
The second challenge is the establishing
of ground rules. According to Bruce Tuckman's group development model in 1965,
there are five stages, including forming, storming, norming, performing and
adjourning. The ground rules should be established in the first norming stage
(Sadri, 2012). The rules should include the vision of the team, everyone’s
roles and responsibilities, project schedule and to be more effective, the ways
of communication, the rules of meetings as well as the principles to follow
when conflicts are encountered. These rules will help to ensure each team
member to contribute and focus on task, as well as helping the virtual team to
run smoothly and avoid conflicts to a large extent. Siebdrat indicated in
his research that teams with high level of task-related processes outperform
teams with low level, which was showed in the following picture.
For the lack of virtual team experiences
and leader, we did not establish these ground rules after our first chatting
and greetings. But there was an underlying common goal that was to finishing
this project before the deadline. Besides, we followed several cursory steps to
attain this goal consciously which included determining the topic first, then
choosing the specific partners, and finally refining the whole plan. Actually,
I am not quite sure how we made the agreement to follow these steps, but this agreement
really helped when we got stuck in the middle of the project, as it drove us to
move on to the next step.
The third challenge is reducing and
solving conflicts in virtual teams. Regular physical presence of coworkers
improves people’s feeling of familiarity and fondness, while physical distance
decreases closeness and affinity, which then leads to a greater potential for
conflict (Siebdrat, 2009). This indicates one way to avoid conflicts, that is,
to keep regular face-to-face connections with the teammates. We did not use
this way. Instead, we avoided conflicts by building trust and norms. It was
really difficult to trust someone we did not met before. But in order to finish
the project more smoothly, we decided to build trust. As we were people who
believed in Douglas McGregor’s Theory Y, we started the process from having
high expected trusts toward the other team. We believed that they had the same
goals as us and were self motivated to finish their work. It really worked,
because with that high expected trust, we could easily understand the other
team because we never judged their attitudes but ways they did the job, when
they failed to reply our mails or argued with us. Meanwhile, we built trust
through communication. We chatted a lot on whats app. When we chatted, we
watched our expressions and always tried to be polite and objective. In
addition, we talked about things beyond the project so as to have a better
understanding about team mates for the other team, because we believed that
trust should be based on better understanding. Besides, we tried to establish
an environment that we were open to discuss different ideas just as what we did
in our DIB group internally. Furthermore, we showed to other teammates that we
were reliable by giving timely feedbacks, as well as sharing information and
knowledge to them.
The way we used to solve conflicts was
mainly avoiding, which made the whole process smoothly. For example, one reason
to cause conflicts to virtual teams is that team members have to negotiate the
meeting times and sometimes it requires them to reorganize their workdays to
accommodate other’s schedules, which cause frustration and confusion. For
example, it was difficult for us to fix the meeting time because our other
teammates were part-time students and had to work at daytime. So as to fix this
time gap, we accommodated to set the meeting at night or weekends. The other
ways we used to solve conflicts including positive influencing. For example,
one conflict in our virtual team was that different team members had different
priorities over this project so that some members were not devoted as others.
In order to solve this problem, in addition to set clear individual goals, we
showed them our great enthusiasm about this project and then made use of the
fact that a self-motivated team member would not want to let his team mates
down. So we used this way to keep most of our teammates motivated and
contributing.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the critical success
factors of virtual teams include strong leadership, mutual goals and specific
ground rules, high levels of trust, clear and open communication and effective
use of communication technologies, which are also applicable to non-virtual
teams.
References
Johnson, L. K.
(2002). Does e-mail escalate conflict? MIT Sloan Management Review, 44(1),
14-15.
Sadri, G., &
Condia, J. (2012). Managing the virtual world. Industrial Management, 54(1),
21-25,5.
Siebdrat, F.,
Hoegl, M., & Ernst, H. (2009). How to manage virtual teams. MIT Sloan
Management Review, 50(4), 63-68.
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