Virtual Teams

Virtual Teams

Introduction

As the world is changing dynamically, businesses tend to operate virtually dispersed and isolated. Virtual businesses are supported by the information technology systems throughout the world. Geographically dispersed individuals work for the same purpose and stay connected through exchanging information and communication. This has been made possible due to the rapid growth in the IT technology.

Virtual Teams have no boundaries for time, space and organization. The individuals who are linked by the communication technology are devoted to a common purpose, having independent goals and they are individually accountable for their performance in the business. Face-to-face teams have more ease of work than virtual teams. The skills need to be more effective in the virtual teams than the traditional face-to-face teams (Jarvenpaa, Knoll and Leidner 1998).

Organization is allowed to hire and retain those individuals in their organization who are geographically located in many different areas. This brings up the diversity of people in the organization which help them learn from different experiences and knowledge attained by each of the individual who is a part of that organization. A specific goal is given to the individuals according to their isolated expertise in order to benefit the organization by behaving as a self managed team. The virtual team can be expanded over the world.

There are seven major kinds of virtual teams, which are as follows

1. Network Team 2. Parallel Teams 3. Project or Product-Development Teams

4. Work or Production Teams

5. Service Teams 6. Management Teams

7. Action Teams

The nature or virtual teams is temporary and they are usually not found for a longer period of time. They did not know each other before that's the reason they have no history records. This increases chances of risks as well. They have different cultures and are linked together with the electronic media covering the distance factors among them.

Discussion

Balance Between Togetherness and Apartness in Virtual Teams

Traditional face-t-face teams are easier to handle than the virtual teams in terms of accountability, managing the conflicts, decision making process, expressions of the opinions, generating ground-breaking ideas and delivery of quality output. Virtual teams are more challenging to manage as a team (RW.Culture Wizard, 2010).

In virtual teams, each individual is accountable for his responsibilities and duties with respect to his work and designation. However it is difficult to keep a check on the performances of all the individuals, they are bound to report and act accountable to the immediate supervisors as their prime responsibility. In traditional face-to-face organization, as individuals are located in the same organization, in case of any conflict between them or for any other purpose they can gather at one place and resolve the issue.

Whereas, in virtual teams individuals are facing differences of language and time zones as they are located in different countries. This is very challenging in the virtual organization. However, technology has made their life quite easier for them by introducing different software for video-conferencing and many other modes of ...