Among The List Of Things For Managers To Consider When

Virtual teams have emerged to mitigate the challenges of managing teams that are distributed across different regions, and are a sustainable component of global business. A project manager managing a virtual team would have to integrate communication strategies, project management techniques including human and social processes in order to support the team, (Kimball, 1997). The author is a project manager assigned to lead a virtual team of 300 volunteers located across the globe to develop recommendations for regulating carbon emissions in the world. As indicated Kimball (1997), this kind of a virtual team usually supports people working in the same professional field and most of the

Geert Hofstede’s framework is a referenced approaches for analysing culture variations. The dimensions conjointly illustrate the impact of the culture ingrained in society on the values of the members. They also describe the relationship between these values and behaviour and using a structure based on factor analysis. Hofstede conducts a study about the difference in cultural environments in the 1970s and 1980s. He surveyed more than 116000 IBM employees in 40 countries about their work-related values. He also finds about the managers and employees vary on five dimensions national culture. These five dimensions are power distance, individualism versus collectivism, achievement versus nurturing, uncertainty avoidance and long-term versus short-term orientation.

Virtual Team on the other hand is a group of people working across time, space, and organizational boundaries which communication links are strengthened by the internet. It should be noted that virtual teams can also mean individuals spread across different cultures and languages. (“Virtual Team - Origin, Definition and its Scope,” 2016). More so, this team of geographically dispersed professionals working together as a unit despite distance are committed to achieving a single objective, holding one another mutually accountable.

Hertel, Guido, Susanne Geister, and Udo Konradt. 2005. “Managing virtual teams: A review of current empirical research.” Human Resource Management Review 15 (1): 69-95. doi: 10.1016/j.hrmr.2005.01.002.

Globalisation has led to many changes in the international marketing and global advertising industry. Many international companies have projects spanning a variety of nationalities, involving great geographical distances and a range of time zones. In this scenario, companies are forced to make virtual teams - which are comprised of members who are located in more than one physical location (Peters and Manz, 2007). This virtual team trait has fostered extensive use of a variety of forms of computer-mediated communication that enable geographically dispersed members to coordinate their individual effort and inputs (Attaran, 2002). In addition, commitment to a virtual team goal may be further complicated by the single or coherent line of

Cultural values can be defined as standards that are considered acceptable or unacceptable to a particular culture. I examined two research articles, one comparing the cultural values of Polish and Turkish employees and the other comparing Indian and U.S. value orientations. I choose these articles because they gave a good representation of almost all our global business cultures. India with its Asian influence; the U.S., which is distinctly western; Poland with its European influence; and Turkey with its Middle Eastern influence. These two articles come together nicely to give an accurate representation of what’s important to the culture and how those characteristics influence employees in the work place and how managers can better communicate with their global employees. Furthermore, I choose this topic out of personal interest and from my experience working in an international department this past year.

1998), this review focuses particularly on quantitative field research of existing virtual teams in order to

Using collaborative virtual workspaces will generally benefit an organisation by allowing the most skilled groups to work on projects no matter where they are. This also means that expensive travel costs can be cut, since groups can work together at any time of the day and don’t need to physically meet up with one another. It also has the effect that group members can work at times that suit them best as they will have access to the information when they need it (ed. Young, 2010).

The project utilizes a virtual team approach with members remotely located in various locations. This presents unique challenges, but virtual teams in real world contexts are able to overcome barriers in similar ways to face to face teams. It is suggested to develop virtual work spaces where team members have clear goals, are required to communicate with each other, and accept the possibility of working with current team members again in the future (Thorley 2016). Much of the project work is coordinated through conference calls. The team at SUU acts as note takers on these calls.

The evolution of globalization and the advancement of communication technology have increased the amount of cross cultural, virtual teams in existence in today’s business world. Cross cultural, virtual teams can leverage on the diverse experiences of its members to achieve good results even without the members meeting face to face.

The world is becoming smaller and smaller and the advancement in technology has enabled a diversity of communication and collaboration tools that were unaffordable for most companies to implement. Most of these companies have employed the use of virtual groups to deal with their business endeavors because of many reasons. Some of them include the urgency to address their customer problems, developing products and delivery services. With the ability to create virtual teams, these teams are operating without limitations of distance, time and global boundaries. These

The reduction of costs in ICT, and a number of useful and helpful IT collaboration tools have helped to streamline this process. However, as with dealing with a team on-site issues of social capital, rewards, recognitions and fulfillment of social and personal needs are also an important part of contributing to a well-rounded and productive team. Therefore, these issues also need to be factored in and it is much harder to deal with these social nuances from a remote location. However, trying to take steps to actively encourage feelings of involvement and participation are very worthwhile. This can include investing in on-site visits, keeping employees up to date with blogs and ensuring adequate rewards and recognition are also important.

One of the most important components in any type of team is communication. Excellent communication between the team members is important to achieve the team goals. Talking about achieving goals of the team, it is central to have shared team goals. Also, mutual respect and trust among the team members are main components of the team as well. There are five identified components of a virtual team. “There differentiators- commitment and engagement, shared processes for decision making, information flow, trust, and collaboration- are the most important components of optimal virtual team performance” (Derosa & Lepsinger, 2010, p. 51). Not all teams perform the same functions; however, some teams use a similar approach to reach the goals. There are many types of teams in today’s business world and those teams have similarities in a way they approach the goals. Teams today are more diverse and more open to the news changes compare to the teams in the past.

o In today’s workplace, many employees perform much of their work on computers and may work in virtual teams, connected electronically to colleagues around the world

Based on Hofstede’s (1993) definition of national culture, it is stated that national culture is the software of the mind, and it is deeply embedded in everyday life and fairly resistant to change. Moreover, it is confirmed that national culture has a significant relationship with HR policies and practice (Hofstede, 1993). Also, Earley (1994) demonstrated that national cultural values that reinforce HR are more likely to yield predictable behaviour and better performances. This is because a national culture is usually characterized by the values of the people who belong to that culture, so well HR practices are consistent with existing behaviour expectations and routines that transcend the workplace. Employees are not distracted from work if HR practices are consistent with national cultural value. The various values had been grouped, by Schuler and Jackson (1994), into four categories, work goal importance, need deficiency, fulfillment, and job satisfaction, managerial and organizational variables, and work role and interpersonal orientation. Furthermore, Hofstede (1993) has presented four largely independent dimensions of differences among national values systems, which were labeled "Power Distance", "Uncertainty Avoidance," "Individualism vs. Collectivism," and "Masculinity vs. Femininity."