Manage a Virtual Team Developing

¶ … Manage a Virtual Team

Developing a virtual team is more than just assembling a global team of experts who over time have proven they can work for the most part autonomously on complex tasks yet also contribute to larger project-team goals. It's also more than a matter of giving them a specific mission or strategic objective, often knowledge-based and very time-constraint to accomplish. These areas include competitive analysis, pricing analysis, programming or any other profession that is highly specialized yet capable of being accomplished by a single contributor in an organization. What is critical for the formation of a virtual team is the ability to create high levels of cross-member and leader trust (Shipley, Johnson, Hashemi, 2009). Transformational leadership styles that seek to maximize the potential of each team members' abilities and also seek to also shield the team from unproductive politics in other areas of the organization is essential (Purvanova, Bono, 2009). Virtual team leaders have exceptionally high expectations as a result and need to continually progress to becoming transformational vs. transactional in their approach to managing (Siebdrat, Hoegl, Ernst, 2009). It is very challenging to create a successful virtual team and have its operations integrated into the broader organization so politics are minimized and contributions maximized. Yet in the context of any organization this can be achieved through the development of strategies that seek to provide virtual team members with autonomy and with virtual team leaders who can be honest and transparent on the one hand, yet demanding enough so that individual team contributors on the other will practice enough self-discipline to get their work done. This is a classic balance of McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y approaches to management (Sager, 2008). One the one hand a manager of a virtual team must create enough of a sense of ownership in the shared objectives to gain internalization of the goals by team members (Wakefield, Leidner, Garrison, 2008) yet on the other there must be a sense of duty and work ethic, and responsibility to the team as well (Sager, 2008).

The managing of virtual teams is infinitely more complex than managing teams in a physical location as a result of this dynamic. When managing teams locally the dimension of worth focus can be more easily ascertained and audited if a manager chooses to. Yet virtually there is the shared implication of trust and the need for the manager to continually strive to keep these aspects of the relationship they have with each subordinate positive and open (Shipley, Johnson, Hashemi, 2009). To question this aspect of any virtual subordinate's commitment without just cause is to potentially throw the entire virtual team into a lack of trust. The entire precept on which a successful virtual team is built is trust between virtual team members and with the manager. To violate or doubt the intentions of team members is to invite isolationism, and eventually the balkanization and break up of the group if it goes on too long (Sager, 2008). This is a delicate balance for any manager to keep, as they are expected to get significant results from their team weekly yet if a virtual team member is not producing the approaches to getting greater productivity vary significantly from strategies used within an office. Above all, the need to maintain trust while also being a more supportive, transitional leader vs. An autocratic and demanding one is critically important (Wakefield, Leidner, Garrison, 2008). Only by adopting this type of management style can a virtual team member hope to be successful. The upside of course is that members of virtual teams have remarkable skills for the most part and often put in many more hours than those who work in offices. This is often due to the fact that the overlaying of their roles as husbands or wives, parents and workers frequently overlap in the same home and their job becomes an increasingly larger part of their identity. For virtual team members the relative predictability of their jobs may be a sanctuary from the more chaotic, less ordered worlds of their homes, especially if small children are in the household.