Following through with specific member concerns or issues, recognizing different perspectives of team members, and recognizing the team members themselves are additional communication norms that must be instilled in virtual teams to facilitate the strong imprint of the team's norms within each member/individual. These communication norms will respond to the need of team members to not feel detached and isolated from their own team, considering the nature of virtual teams (Kirkman, 2002:par
1). Moreover, team norms are reinforced primarily in groups with specific characteristics, such as those who are known to have high perceived social cohesion and performance within the team or group (Patterson, 2005:482)
In addition, I also contributed to making collaboration happen by sharing more of what was going on with other members of the team who could not make virtual meetings. In many respects my roles on a virtual team are much like what occurs across larger, more global teams in enterprises today (Berry, 2011)
In many respects my roles on a virtual team are much like what occurs across larger, more global teams in enterprises today (Berry, 2011). The cycle of being a member of a virtual team, then contributor and eventually becoming a collaborator and communicator is typical of the lifecycle of many virtual teams (Furst, Reeves, Rosen, Blackburn, 2004)
This also parallels with the virtual team lifecycle process. The growing reliance on collaborative platforms that can manage real-time communication and collaboration continues to grow as companies recruit globally for their virtual teams to get the best talent available (Townsend, DeMarie, Hendrickson, 1998) In conclusion, the experiences of being part of a virtual team showed me just how critical it is to have a common set of expectations and a clear approach to communicating what needs to be done
Organizational learning occurs when autonomy, mastery and purpose are accomplished by subordinates, in addition to employee satisfaction and retention increasing as a result. Conversely there is no clear-cut path of cause-and-effect management and leadership techniques to ensure the success of a virtual team (DeRosa, 9)
The most critical aspect of virtual team development and leadership is coaching and managing team members to attain the highest levels of autonomy, mastery and purpose they are capable of in their area of expertise. When this occurs, virtual teams are capable of managing high levels of uncertainty and risk while attaining challenging and often complex missions and goals (Eom, 13, 14)
Instead a focus on how to successfully self-motivate virtual team members through a combination of Theory Y leadership styles (Sager, 289, 290) and the use of transactional leadership techniques that reward consistently high performance are very important. Successful leadership of virtual teams relies also on the extent to which trust can be nurtured and strengthened across geographically dispersed team members (Jang, 406, 407)
Over time virtual team members who have been managed well and given the chance to attain autonomy, mastery and purpose in their jobs trust each other enough to share increasingly valuable information. In the highest performing virtual teams when this occurs knowledge sharing becomes more prevalent and the virtual team becomes a learning ecosystem (Lee-Kelley, Sankey, 51)
A Theory X approach to managing teams therefore does not scale globally well at all. Instead a focus on how to successfully self-motivate virtual team members through a combination of Theory Y leadership styles (Sager, 289, 290) and the use of transactional leadership techniques that reward consistently high performance are very important
As a result it often is the case that the most effective managers of virtual teams lead by example and seek to provide enough guidance and support for the virtual team members themselves to grow in autonomy, mastery and skill in their given areas. Highly effective managers who transition into leadership roles of virtual teams are able to provide subordinates with enough coaching, even remotely, to give them autonomy, mastery and purpose of their needed skill sets and roles (Shriberg, et
Virtual teams that are the highest performing attain this level of information exchange, creating trust-based knowledge networks as a result. While technology is not the centerpiece or core component of the strategies to create a virtual team capable of becoming a learning ecosystem, it does play a part in making collaboration more efficient and focused over time (Vaccaro, Veloso, Brusoni, 1278)
This finding emanated from the studies of the most successful adoption cycles and patterns of these technologies over the long-term. Transformational leaders, not surprisingly, have the most successful track record deploying these technologies over the long-term (Balthazard, Waldman, Warren, 2009)
Each of these tools has a specific use to the attainment of the highest levels of performance within globally-based virtual teams. Social networks are also turning into one of the most powerful catalysts of innovation in the area of virtual teams as they are driving the development of state-of-the-art operating systems for smartphones and tablets including the Apple iPad (Bernoff, Li, 2008)
To evaluate and explore the many factors that contribute to this finding would take another chapter, yet to succinctly define this dynamic, transformational leaders are seen as orders of magnitude more authenticity, transparent and willing to sacrifice for the success of their teams compared to transactional or authoritarian-based managers (Balthazard, Waldman, Warren, 2009). They are also experts at using these technologies to create a safety net for virtual team members to rely on when they need reassurance, recognition, motivation and continued validation they are moving in the right direction with their projects (Casey, 2010)
Social networks are also turning into one of the most powerful catalysts of innovation in the area of virtual teams as they are driving the development of state-of-the-art operating systems for smartphones and tablets including the Apple iPad (Bernoff, Li, 2008). This trend in smartphones and tablets is so pervasive than it is anticipated these devices will surpass PCs in shipments during 2011 (Hardy, 2010)
This capability in portal technologies significantly accelerates knowledge transfer and data management across global boundaries, as team members can quickly create and maintain their own pages and areas of a portals, in effect creating the ability to serve team members on a 24/7 basis. The integration of structured and unstructured content in these portals is unified through contextual search technologies that can create linguistic models literally on the fly to put unstructured, comment-based content into context quickly so it can be used quickly by teams (Holtshouse, 2009)
As with any study it is not necessary purely the technology that separates the highest and lowest performing virtual teams. Rather it is the decision on the part of team leaders to selectively use these technologies to create a virtual team that is capable of being self-sufficient and focused on assisting each other to their shared and often complex goals (Jang, 2009)
Best Practices in Technology Use by Virtual Teams There are many technological developments occurring today across the collection of technologies virtual teams rely on. Portals based on enterprise-class software platforms from IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and others are now commonplace as the virtual content management system millions of teams use globally for sharing documents and creating their own unique approaches to organizing team information (Lamont, 2010)
These developments in portal technologies have led to an entirely new level of agility and flexibility in portal design to support virtual teams. These developments taken together are also creating an increasingly higher level of cross-department and cross-functional collaboration and knowledge transfer across corporations globally (Lin, Chiu, Joe, Tsai, 2010)