Virtual TeamS Effective
>Christina B. Gibson
and Susan G. Cohen

Two problems plague the use of the term virtual team. First, people casually use it to apply to a wide variety of social and organizational phenomena. And second, several other terms are used to describe what may be the same phenomenon. Virtual team, in reality, is a functional team - a collection of individuals who are interdependent in their tasks, share responsibility for outcomes, see themselves and are viewed by others as an intact social unit embedded in one or more social systems and collectively manage their relationships across the organizational boundaries. The members of the team are geographically dispersed. And the team relies on technology mediated communications rather than face-to-face interaction to accomplish their tasks.
Enabling conditions for virtual team effectiveness
For virtual teams to perform well, three enabling conditions need to be established:
* Shared understanding
* Integration
* Mutual trust

Shared understanding
It is the degree of cognitive overlap and commonality in beliefs, expectations and perceptions about a given target. Virtual teams need to develop this shared understanding about what they are trying to achieve (their goals), how they will achieve them (work and group processes), what they need to do (their tasks) and what each team member brings to the team task (member knowledge, skills and abilities). When teams involve people from different disciplines, business units, organizations and cultures, their members will have different ways of perceiving their tasks, key issues and making sense of the situation. The new product development team members inhabit different thought worlds because of these differences. By developing shared understandings, virtual teams learn how to bridge the chasm between thought worlds.
The team characteristics that affect shared understanding in a virtual team are: geographical distance, unshared contexts and reliance on communication technologies.
Geographical distance
Virtual teams, because of the geographical distance that separate members, rely more heavily on communication and information technologies to facilitate interaction and coordinate work than members who share a common physical environment.

Unshared contexts
Along with physical distance often come differences in context. Contextual differences are revealed in different works and geographical environments, different technologies and different cultures. For instance, a project in which drilling equipment experts at British Petroleum headquarters remotely assisted engineers on a mobile drilling ship in the North Sea. The work, weather conditions and close quarters on a drilling ship undoubtedly created a different work atmosphere from what would be expected at headquarters. These contextual differences can make it more difficult to develop a shared understanding.

Reliance on communication technology
Communication technologies make members of virtual team stay in touch with one another and share information. However, these technologies have limitations that easily lead to misinterpretation. They cannot provide the same richness as face-to-face interaction. Because of delays in transmission and the lack of social and non-verbal cues, communication technologies may interfere with open communication, knowledge sharing and the ability of teams to identify and to resolve misunderstanding.

Integration
It is the process of establishing ways in which the parts of an organization can work together to create value, develop products or deliver services. The parts of the organization represented by virtual team members are likely to be highly differentiated in response to global competitive pressures and uncertain business environments. This differentiation across organizational units means that they are likely to have different policies, organizational structures and systems. These differences can hinder effective collaboration in virtual teams both directly and indirectly. When organizational units have different Information Technology infrastructures, for instance, connectivity can be a real problem. At the most basic level, virtual team members may not be able to send e-mails to team members from other business units. In a more subtle way, business units, policies, structures and systems influence employee behaviors, providing incentives for certain behaviors and disincentives for others. Incentives for cross-unit collaboration may be lacking. Policies, structures and systems also shape employee perspectives and worldviews on what is and is not important. The greater the degree of differentiation in an organization, the greater is the need for integration. The formation of virtual teams is one mechanism to encourage integration.
In essence, integration refers to organizational structures and systems, while shared understanding refers to people’s thoughts. Integration is a structural variable; shared understanding is cognitive. However, the two work together. The greater the differentiation between business units, the more likely it is that team members will inhabit different thought worlds, making it more difficult to develop shared understanding. At the same time, the lower the level of integration, the greater the difficulty of developing shared understanding.
Mutual trust
It is a shared psychological state characterized by an acceptance of vulnerability based on expectations of intentions or behaviors of others within the team. Teams that have established mutual trust are safe environments for their members, who are thereby willing to take risks with one another and let their vulnerabilities show. Trust is difficult to establish in virtual teams since the members are geographically dispersed and are likely to have different backgrounds, experiences and cultures. People tend to trust those whom they perceive as similar to themselves. Electronically mediated communication lacks the interpersonal cues that are so important for building trust. Hence special steps need to be taken to build trust in virtual teams.

What make virtual teams special?
The more teams become virtual, the more they experience certain unique phenomena that set them apart from teams at the co-located end of the degree of virtuality continuum. These phenomena have been categorized into four broad categories: technological complexity, extensive diversity, dynamic nature of work, and developmental idiosyncrasies.
Technological complexity
Virtual teams rely substantially more on information technology than collocated teams and use collaborative technology to connect people more so than collocated teams do. This puts a premium on standardized and efficient storage, retrieval and exchange of knowledge and technology training. Technology is a critical component of virtual teaming yet it is essential to recognize that virtual teams are not just technological systems; they are socio-technological systems, that is, social systems completely intertwined with technology systems. Perhaps as a result, the use of advanced technology is relatively uncommon in virtual teams with most team members preferring e-mail as the primary mode of communication.
Use of technology is complicated by the composition of most virtual teams. Furthermore, because different cultures are often involved, silence and lack of responses to communications by technology can have multiple meanings across contexts represented on virtual teams, including indifference, technical failure, discomfort or confusion. Finally, some of the team members may have access to electronic communication only during certain hours. These features are unique and surprisingly salient in virtual teams that rely heavily on electronic communications.

Extensive Diversity
Perhaps the second most prominent feature of virtual teams that sets apart from collocated teams is that virtuality brings together highly diverse groups, including people form diverse nations, regions, organizations, and professions. On average, highly virtual teams tend to be more diverse than co-located teams, and hence the difference does make a difference. For example, there are different formal and informal rules that dictate work-place interaction and different policies and government regulations for human resources; moreover, the stability and efficiency of economic and political environment vary greatly among members in a virtual team. Furthermore, virtual teams are embedded within the larger network of an organization or multiple organizations and they often have members with multiple domains of expertise. Several authors emphasize that the national, organizational and professional cultures that mingle have their own shared understanding, sense making, beliefs, expectations and behaviors. On some virtual teams, members share many cultural characteristics; on others, there is a high degree of cultural difference.
A fascinating and somewhat ironic finding is that when members of virtual teams share many cultural characteristics (for example, all are westernized or all have the same function), subtle cultural differences may go unnoticed, but they cause real surprises as the team interacts. Thus, members cannot take for granted that other members share their contextual knowledge or have a common frame of reference. They are especially likely to hold tacit knowledge unavailable to others, so context must be articulated for sharing to take place. In fact, the more the differences represented on a virtual team, the more information there is to be shared. In particular, members need to share more information about context than they would if working in the same location.
Coinciding with cultural differences on virtual teams are differences in the way in which people use language and this could have a subtle and profound impact on virtual teams. For example, across culture, communication varies in the extent to which people use implicit versus explicit language (for example, use of qualifiers such as maybe, perhaps, or somewhat), the extent to which messages are context free or context specific, the degree to which messages contain emotional content or a serious tone and the degree to which informal versus formal channels of communication are used.
Finally, more so in highly virtual teams, it is often necessary to create a hybrid culture, structure, and set of operating policies that represents a compromise among various alternatives preferred by the team. Therefore, cross cultural skills and training, a learning orientation, lateral understanding, and cross-functional capabilities are critical in virtual teams.

Dynamic Nature of Work
A third set of unique features pertains to the fundamental nature of work processes in virtual teams. With virtuality comes an added degree of flexibility in the type of work that can be accomplished. Although, face-to-face teams also perform knowledge work, it is even more likely in virtual teams that knowledge will develop unexpectedly and change over time and that it often involves novel problems, negotiation and interpretation. Virtual work often needs to be construed as conversation making, sense making, and community making consisting of trade-offs and deliberations. In fact, even the participants may be unknown in advance; perhaps there are other priorities. Therefore, there cannot be a rigid sequence of activities imposed on the work; tools cannot be structured to assume the presence of any given participant; and work structures must often emerge.
The global new product development occurs through a system composed of a set of complex and overlapping task network, typically linking multiple product lines and several geographies, and that accomplishing the strategic intent of the global firm depends on developing shared meaning to guide sense making processes in the team. This often occurs simultaneously within and across different parts of the system, including in different units or projects and with customers and suppliers.
In addition to placing a premium on dynamic sense making, virtual team collaboration requires both synchronous and asynchronous work. In many a case, creating team output through iterative reflection is often easier in synchronous mode. In fact, reflection will likely take longer if done asynchronously because responses may not be made with people in the same frame of mind thus leading to loss of mind share between responses. Surprisingly, in virtual teams, doing and communicating often occur at the same time; for example, a discussion may begin verbally and escalate to sketching on a shared white board.
It was also interesting to note that that the type of relationships and linkages that are important in a virtual team depends on which task characteristics are dominant. Some virtual tasks are primarily integration (for example, combining knowledge to develop a new product), others require differentiation (as with customizing with different markets), and still others are learning tasks (benchmarking for example). Integration tasks require extensive internal social capital, that is, internal networks of relationships. Differentiation tasks require extensive links external to the team and ties can be weaker. Finally, learning tasks probably require a balance of the two types of networks. Configurations of networks are often combined in virtual teams with varied tasks to achieve the best of all worlds.
Developmental Idiosyncrasies
The fourth category of unique features pertains to the developmental patterns that escort virtuality. In highly virtual teams, initial structure, start up, and formation activities are potentially more critical than in collocated teams because they provide common ground needed to bridge differences and develop basic operating structure. Furthermore, given that many factors known to contribute to social control and coordination, such as geographical proximity, similarity in backgrounds, and experience with each other, are often absent in virtual teams, the development of collective trust is critical. This development requires a balance between an optimal level of risk and interdependence is necessary to create opportunities to demonstrate trust. Without any risk or interdependence, trust is not necessary.
Team leaders typically play a key role in the process of balancing risk and interdependence. Interestingly, leaders often emerge in virtual teams when they are not formally designated. Emergent leaders tend to be rated higher than other members in terms of trust, particularly role performance trust, which involves demonstrating competency with the tasks and behaviors necessary to accomplish term goals. This is gained through reliability, consistency, quality of work, initiative and experience. Emergent leaders also tend to be rated higher than other members on transformational leadership (influencing though values and ideas, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individual consideration)
Beyond developmental issues related to trust, the flow of knowledge and information is related to the development of networks of relationships in a virtual team, particularly the sub-groups that often form. Interestingly, if sub-groups tend to coincide with the different subtasks of the group (with different types of expertise to apply to different client problems), then knowledge will flow more effectively; if the sub groups do not coincide with subtasks, then knowledge flows are often compromised. This process is complicated by the fact that members of the virtual teams are often on their best behavior because they consider themselves something of ambassadors of the groups they represent. Yet, ironically, in virtual teams, crisis and conflict often most clearly signal the need for integration and help to bridge differences represented on the team.

Advantages of virtual teams
When highly virtual teams are implemented effectively, they bring many advantages to collaborative efforts. And there are found to be three major categories of such advantages: innovation and synergy, effort and performance gains, and constructive influence tactics, politics and conflict.

Innovation and Synergy
When virtual teams bring together representatives from numerous locations, they allow synergetic interactions among parties that might otherwise duplicate effort or even work at cross purposes. Virtuality potentially increases the number of participants and overall contributions to meetings, and allows members to maintain access to their home competing environment and desktop tools, which facilitates knowledge capture and search. In global new product development efforts, for example, virtual teams facilitate work that occurs across diverse and dispersed knowledge centers. By virtue of different locations, members can tap into multiple sources of information and knowledge and this broad spectrum of knowledge can be leveraged on behalf of the team and the organization. The process of obtaining information is greatly facilitated by building relationships within and outside the team; members hear about what is important from other people they know, they area related to potentially useful knowledge and information and they interpret meaning in part based on its knowledge of its origins. Good relationships with the right people can help team members acquire knowledge and analysis that competitors cannot obtain.

Effort and Performance Gains
If diverse intelligence is leveraged in virtual teams, it allows better outcomes than the best individual team member could achieve alone. Teammates are able to work around the clock without violating the personal time of any one member. Virtual teams have a strong potential advantage over collocated teams with respect to their ability to implement decisions because of the strong ties that distributed members can develop locally within clients, customers and other external constituents. In addition, some forms of electronic media, such as text-based conferencing and discussion groups, have been found to facilitate a more equal and full representation of team member inputs. It is less likely that a vocal and assertive member can dominate a group that relies primarily on text-based electronic media, and virtually often decreases power and hierarchy issues in teams. Finally, many managers find that performance is easier to document and review in virtual teams, given that most interactions and commitments are archived electronically.

Constructive conflict, influence and politics
A third important set of advantages accrues regarding processes in virtual team. For example, relationship conflict, which has demonstrated dysfunctional impacts in teams, is more likely to be filtered out of computer-mediated communication. Furthermore, in virtual teams, communication is often more explicit and therefore may avoid the common problem of misunderstandings found in less explicit forms of communication.
In terms of influence processes, rationality and sanction are used more frequently in virtual teams, and these tend to be the most functional forms of influence. The less popular and socially acceptable influence tactics, such as pressure, sanction and legitimating, are typically used less frequently because lower familiarity and intimacy serve as gatekeepers to these tactics. Political behavior takes on a more careful and covert form in virtual teams because communication is more frequently documented. Cultural boundaries and differences restrain people from using extremely aggressive influence and politics and, moreover, there are fewer stable political coalitions based on cultural subgroups in virtual teams.

Disadvantages of virtual teams
No organizational form is perfect. Alongside the benefits, virtuality brings several drawbacks that can constitute major barriers to virtual team effectiveness if they are not explicitly addressed through various design and process techniques. There are broadly five categories of such challenges: technology failures, communication mishaps, dysfunctional conflict, inefficient work processes and challenges to support systems.

Technology failures
Across members, the quality and capacity of the infrastructure for communication vary, limiting access and the feasibility of high-bandwidth technologies such as videoconferencing. In addition, members often have different formats and protocols for storing knowledge. These variations in availability of advanced technology and resources to support them can cause major communication breakdowns. To complicate matters, most technologies treat knowledge as object (focus on information only) or knowledge as action (focus on collaborative processes only) and therefore fail to support the full range of virtual team activities and needs. In addition, many of the collaborative structures that are referred to as teams are actually communities of practice and work groups and therefore have different technology needs. Even when everyone agrees that the need for a true team structure exists, members rarely share the same computing platform, even within the same firm.

Communication mishaps
In highly virtual teams, there is less opportunity to engage in informal and social interaction; communication is more formal and less time is allocated for non-task behavior. Furthermore, involvement in a virtual team is often less central that involvement with a member’s local environment, with less emotional attachment, vested interest and identification. In turn, this means lower familiarity and intimacy and less self-disclosure. English and second language may exacerbate this and can result in less depth and candidness of exchange, which increases psychological distance and fears of misuse, miscommunication and misinterpretation of knowledge. As a result, there is often a higher perception of risk which increases ambiguity and complexity of information exchanged.
Hence, virtual teams may need more time to make sure all voices are adequately heard. Differences in phonics and syntax, unfamiliar accents and inappropriate use of vocabulary can make it difficult or impossible to understand each other. Participants who are not physically located at or near headquarters or with the core of the team may be at a disadvantage because they do not have as many opportunities to participate in informal exchanges. All of these phenomena may interfere with creativity and satisfaction, which are linked to team performance.

Dysfunctional conflict
A third set of disadvantages pertains to conflict. Although teams experience advantages related to conflict due to virtual nature of their work, these benefits may create challenges. For example, virtual team members often do not have the opportunity to engage serendipitously in sense making, and communication is often limited to brief episodes; this is efficient in some ways but may potentially increase opportunities for misunderstandings. Consensus is more difficult to reach in virtual teams, particularly in teams working on complex, non-technical issues. In addition, conflict is likely to be hidden longer in a virtual team and there may be higher levels of process-based conflict because members are likely to use different work processes. Thus, virtual team members often err on the side of dispositional attributions, assuming behavior was caused by personality, because they lack situational information and are overloaded, and this may make them less likely to try to modify problematic situations. In sum, collocated team-mates can often establish credibility with each other by a process that is not explicitly designed, but virtual team members must create much more explicit routines that will allow this to happen.

Inefficient work processes
A fourth set of disadvantages in virtual teams arises due to the logistics of coordinating work processes across locations. In addition to difficulty in reaching consensus, virtual teams may need more time than a collocated group to accomplish the same basic work task, although the likelihood is that they will have less time. They require advanced lead-time to get materials out to remote sites, and this is often viewed as additional preparation. The geographical distance, different contexts and reliance on technologies lead to fewer similarities across members, less open communication and information sharing and less use of unshared (unique) information and greater possibility of divisive subgroups. Interdependence is often higher within subgroups (for example, within a subset of members who are all from the same organization) than across subgroups. Without opportunities to demonstrate reliability and responsiveness across subgroups, collective trust cannot exist and a negative cycle of divisive conflict will likely ensue. These conditions mean less shared understanding on the team, and this can result in less predictability, less efficient use of resources and effort, more implementation problems and errors, decreased satisfaction and motivation, and increased frustration.
Challenges to support systems
The final category of disadvantages captures difficulties associated with the systems that exist in the organizations in which the virtual teams are embedded, including human resource systems and performance management systems designed to define, develop and review team performance. For example, in virtual teams, there are often vast differences in job designs and staffing patterns across participants and partners. Without common support systems, building competencies and expertise is difficult, and this can hamper overall development, knowledge management and sense making. Furthermore, it is very difficult to determine what each member in a virtual team values, and this is exacerbated by national and cultural differences. These differences make application of traditional motivational techniques extremely difficult in virtual teams. Virtuality may make rewarding individuals more precarious due to increased needs for cohesion, mutual accountability and interdependence.
When informal networks of relationships within a team do not coincide with an organization’s formal structure, conflict may ensue. Control mechanisms to ensure structural alignment can help, but strict mechanisms like formal contracts appear to signal the absence of trust and can hamper its emergence. Equally as challenging, it is more difficult to assign monetary values to costs and benefits not easily quantifiable in order to determine return on investment in virtual teams, particularly for the ancillary benefits of virtuality.
A virtual collaboration does have a number of inherent disadvantages that rather paint a grim picture at times. But by identifying the key potential challenges, areas of opportunity for improving virtual team effectiveness can be located. And with the delineation of right strategies, tools and techniques for addressing the many stumbling blocks in the virtual environment, one can really work out wonders with a team that is virtual.