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Remote global team members miss out on these significant exchanges. We know much less about them. Good global organisations strive to recreate these opportunities within the parameters of different locations, languages and cultures.
It is a key challenge to help make a global team work. Break down the mutual knowledge gap and make your global team work. Here are some ways you can achieve this:. Focus on what is common amongst all colleagues regardless of their location. This often starts with a shared objective of a task or project.
The Cultural Advantage: A New Model for Succeeding with Global Teams introduces a powerful new tool for international companies to overcome the obstacles. The Cultural Advantage: A New Model for Succeeding with Global Teams. Front Cover. Mijnd Huijser. Ayn Press, 0 Reviews.
Highlight the reasons why working across different geographies is better for team members and the organisation as a whole. It might be because knowledge, skills or language and cultural knowledge does not reside in one location, and the task or project may not succeed without global collaboration.
Hold regular meetings to exchange information to enable the task or project to progress better. Identify what this information should include. Make time to do this. Many organisations celebrate birthdays and often incorporate different cultural festivals and other traditions into their corporate calendar. Ask personal questions, but learn the boundaries between welcome interest and an intrusion of privacy. Recognise that the most familiar or most conveniently located colleague is not necessarily the best person to turn to for advice or to rely on as a subject matter expert.
The right person may be located remotely.
They may also be a little bit more effort to work with, but will make the best contribution to the overall success of the project. Explain your working environment to your remote colleagues. Challenges like transport, noise, sharing of resources etc may be very different from location to location. Understanding these differences leads to dealing with them more effectively if they are not a surprise.
Working on a global team has its rewards and challenges, both for the colleagues involved and their organisation. Thinking globally means thinking smarter. Making all members of a global team feel a part of that team, no matter where they are located makes all the difference. Learnlight 11 is here! Free email updates Be first to get the latest content. Making a Global Team Work 1. Understanding each other Switched on companies also recognise that to gain the most out of their global presence, they must also function well in each of their markets. Recognise the importance of getting to know remote colleagues on a personal level as well as on a professional level This includes the need to cross-pollinate ideas and practices that may be very different from one place to another.
There aren't any negative effects on team performance or satisfaction, and team conflict actually decreased as the degree of virtualness increased. Although there was a negative effect on communication frequency and knowledge sharing, the effect was much less in long-term teams compared to short-term teams.
Virtualness also has varying influence on teams depending on how the virtualness is measured as well as the length of time that a team is working together. The negative effects that effect short-term teams disappeared for longer term teams. Their results also showed that there are different effects on virtualness depending on what type of analysis is used individual or group and the methods experiments or surveys of virtual work.
This section introduces the emotional problems involved and mitigation tactics needed to achieve cohesion and trust among team members. Overall, the research about this reports "a positive link between socio-emotional process and outcomes of the virtual team project. This, according to research, results in weaker social links between team-mates and leads the team to be more task-focused than socially focused.
These meetings should focus more on relationship building than on actual business. Social-bonding can be done partially via electronic communication tools.
Jarvenpaa and Leidner's [32] study found that if teams communicate more socially they achieve higher trust and better social and emotional relationships. Leaders can help foster relationship building and general team building in many ways, e. Cohesion -means the sense of unity in a team.
Cohesion is important to virtual teams, and is associated with better performance [34] and greater satisfaction. It has been found that collaborative technologies take away from the development of cohesion within Virtual Teams and that traditional teams have higher level of team cohesiveness. However, virtual teams have difficulty attaining cohesion. Relationship building deals with interactions that increase inclusiveness. Socio-emotional processes and outcomes of virtual team projects are closely related, as virtual teams need to meet the socio-emotional needs of virtual team members in order to be successful.
Trust -is particularly problematic subject with virtual teams, because it is arguable whether people can be expected to trust each other if they have never met faceāto-face. Jarvenpaa and Leidner [41] describe a mechanism of how people solve the trust problem in a short time. It is called the swift trust paradigm and it suggests that team members assume from the beginning that the other team members are trustworthy. They adjust that assumption during the lifetime of the team.
Jarvenpaa and Leidner [41] also researched the differences between teams that had a high level of trust in the beginning and teams with a high amount of trust in the end and compared them. To achieve high trust early in the group's life, the team had social and enthusiastic communication and they coped well with technical uncertainty and took individual initiatives. The groups that enjoyed trust later had predictable communication, timely responses, positive leadership and the ability to move from social communication to task-focused communication.
Task processes are actions that team members carry out in order to accomplish their goal and complete their project. The three main parts to task processes are communication, coordination and task-technology-structure fit. Communication is one of the most crucial things in virtual teams. Communication is vital to the success of the virtual team and it is crucial that the team is a group of excellent communicators with the proper technology for the best levels of communication.
There is an assumption that co-located team members communicate with each other about information that is not communicated to the distant member, which can cause friction between members. Inequalities of hierarchy within the group are reduced via email communication and also make it easier to access higher level employees due to the difficulty of scheduling face to face meetings. However, minority members are more likely to express their opinions in anonymous conditions, though their opinions are more accepted in face-to-face conditions.
The extensive reliance on communication technology leads to reduced effect and difficulties in management compared to the traditional teams. One company has created a reward system for team cooperation to encourage people to actively and accurately communicate. In another company, they emphasized the need to debate as well as merely share information.
Coordination is how much combined effort exists between various parts of an organization and how consistent and coherent they are. Collaboration norms have to develop for the team to function well. This should help the team to coordinate and help the other party.
The task-technology-structure fit examines "the possible fit between various technologies available Electronic communication is more suitable for more structured tasks such as routine analysis, examining design tradeoffs and monitoring project status. In their study, the team first adjusted their organization to the technology at hand, but later also adjusted the technology to their organization.
The majority of research has not found significant evidence of difference between the decision quality of virtual and traditional teams and the number of ideas that were generated.