(Solved by Humans)-Current and Future Trends in Teamwork BUS 350 Organizational

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?I have attached the following question along with the ppt to us to complete this assignment. NO PLAGIARISM and please use the slides to answer the question.?

Current and Future
Trends in Teamwork
BUS 350

Organizational Support for
Team-Based Structures
Human Resources
Information Technology
Physical Plant
What else?

What are Virtual Project Teams?
A virtual project team is a group of geographically
dispersed people working together on a onetime unique effort.

Impact of Driving Forces on Virtual
Teams
Increased the usage of virtual teams
New forces emerging
Existing forces intensifying

Top Driving Forces
High cost of business travel
Security concerns with travel
Outsourcing and offshoring
Desire to have a ?dream team?
Need for cross-organizational interaction
Need for diversity of ideas and experiences
Increase in number of tools for communication and
collaboration

Decrease in cost of tools

Benefits
Is it possible that virtual teams are more
productive than traditional teams?

Virtual Team Performance
Virtual team characteristics leveraged to
enhance team effectiveness
Focused communication
Rigorous planning
Organized meetings
??our view of team virtuality challenges managers
to consider how virtuality can be leveraged to
enhance team effectiveness?? (Kirkman and
Mathiew)

Communication
Methods, processes and procedures people use
to transfer info back and forth

?Virtual teams are comprised of group members
who collaborate from different locations using
communication technology? (Walther et al)

Virtual team members need to work with a
variety of communication styles

Communication tools
Low level of ?media richness? (Malhotra &
Majchrzak)
E-mail
Conference calls

High level of ?media richness?
Videoconferencing
Web conferencing
?Virtual Workspaces?

?Virtual Workspaces?
#

Name of Feature

Description of Feature

Electronic whiteboards

Online whiteboards for posting short messages or bulletins

Collaborative
editors

Tools to allow editing of documents by multiple team members

document

Instant poll capabilities

A tool to gauge member opinions on issues under discussion

Instant messaging

Pop-up messaging tools for immediate access to team members

Calendars for joint scheduling

Common team calendars showing team member availability

Project repository

Common repository for sharing project documents

Discussion threads

Any tool that enables threaded discussions, i.e. blogs, for
conflict identification and resolution

Embedded links

Links to referenced documents included in documents and
discussion threads to facilitate easy retrieval of documents

Annotations to identify owners

Located within documents identifying the owners of particular
perspectives

Versioning
tracking

A method to record and control changes to documents and
easily identify current versions

and

change

Virtual Team Composition
Need ?assessment processes to determine
suitability of team members? (Stevenson and
McGrath)

Team Composition?
??globalization of project teams has increased
demographic and cultural diversity, which can
create obstacles to the smooth functioning of
team processes, but also can provide benefits in
creativity, innovation and problem-solving.?
(Beise)

Needs of Virtual Teams
Software tools and hardware
Training and development in virtual team
processes

Time to practice new processes (Kirkman and
Mathieu)

Multinational Teams

Multicultural Teams
Multinational companies demand multicultural
teams, leaders have to manage different teams
in different places, with different culture.

They have to succeed to have their teams
committed and motivated to achieve a common
goal.

Cultural differences could be a trap, if not
managed adequately.

Distance Matters
Face to face meetings, cafeteria talk, lunch time
is not a constant to remote leaders and multi
regional/ multi cultural teams.

It makes more difficult to create a bond, which
lead to teamwork.

Communication
Clear communication regarding corporate
values, roles and responsibilities, objectives and
best practices are crucial to give the direction to
the team.

Although formal communication, via emails,
business meetings, video conference are
instruments to guarantee understanding of the
above, we cannot forget that informal
communication is essential to keep
cohesiveness.

Independent Sources of
Feedback
It also helps to have alternative sources of
information regarding team and individuals?
performance, attitude and behavior.

Sometimes team or individual performance
could be misinterpreted as a cultural difference.

A trustable local source and 360 performance
evaluation can help to identify the difference.

Be Present and Supportive
A remote leader should be present.
Although it seems contradictory, the team should feel the
leader?s presence though weekly meetings, when he/she
shares business news and follows team?s issues and
deliverables.

When there is a new team member, daily talk is also
recommended to guarantee adequate handover and
integration.

These actions do not substitute a local presence, then
regular visits are important to have the face to face factor,
teams have to feel supported and sure the leader will be
always ?there? to support and track their performance.

Managing Conflict
Adaptation ? Understand and adapt to cultural changes to
figure out how to take them in your advantage

Structural Intervention ? once understood the cultural
differences, take the appropriate speech/ actions and share roles
& responsibilities based on their knowledge and cultural
behavior.

Managerial Intervention ? Be the decision maker, when
cultural decision making process don?t match among teams. A
decision making process could be endless due to different
thinking, then you need to establish productive norms

Exit Strategy ? When there is no agreement about a matter
which jeopardize operations or product delivery, sometimes the
best action is to remove one or both members.



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