Virtual collaboration in organizations and distance learning applications

Virtual Collaboration Techniques

The differences between virtual organizations and the traditional brick and mortar ones

The Antecedents for a successful virtual collaboration

The advantages of virtual collaboration

Disadvantages of virtual collaboration

Virtual collaboration is indicated by Chen, Volt and Lin (77) to involve the processes of collaboration between team members who are involved in working towards the achievement of a common goal, in a classroom or a workplace setting. Virtual collaboration, they noted also refers to the employment of digital technologies that are engaged to enable individuals and organizations in the planning, designing, development, management, research on various products and services in a collaborative fashion using innovative e-commerce and general IT applications.

The concept of virtual collaboration is extensively used in organizations that have virtual teams and especially in the arena of product development in companies that are geographically dispersed (Baxendale and Mellor 96). Another application of virtual; collaboration is in virtual learning/long distance learning (Richard 197; Lisa and Wallace 345;Joiner 197). Employees are noted to be resorting to non-traditional alternatives to work and educational settings.

Virtual collaboration techniques

Virtual teams

A virtual team is defined by Hellriegal and Slocum (229) as a group of individuals who collaborate via certain information technologies on a single or more projects but while located in different geographical locations. It is important for concise, clear as well as mutually acceptable goals to exist in a virtual team setting. The ability to carry out an effective communication is noted as the main glue that holds a given team together. The lack of clear as well as continuous communication as well as a clear mutual set of goals and guidelines is noted as one of the factors that leads to failure of virtual teams.

Qureshi and Zigurs (85) noted that successful virtualization in the corporate environment does not depend on the level of technological sophistication but rather on how the tools are used. These are some of the paradoxes of virtual collaboration.

Virtual Learning

The contemporary economic environment which is marked with a high unemployment rate has forced several workers to seek further education. The process of seeking more education has meant that many go back to school in order to earn their degrees, take technical as well as other forms of classes that wouod enable them in their career advancements. Traditionally, it has been indicated, the process of going back to school has been very difficult for non-conforming students. This is mainly attributed to issues of scheduling since the classes would end up disrupting their scheduled work or family life. There could also be issues that are related to the lack of schooling options as a result of unfavorable geographic location.

The advent of online education via distance learning services has made it possible for this category of people to return to school in order to earn their degrees or take other clas4es aimed at advancing their skills. Most companies have also been noted to resort to e-learning in order to deliver employee training to their workforce, communicate with them as well as present seminars on new products.

Virtual meetings

Web conferencing is one way of conducting virtual meetings. Data conferencing on the other hand is a form of web conferencing in which the participants are involved in the simultaneous sharing of information as well as programs that reside on the PCS through application sharing, file transfer, white boarding as well as chatting. Companies can employ PowerPoint in conducting online meetings.

The Antecedents for a successful virtual collaboration

Peter and Manz (118) further discussed the antecedents for a successful virtual collaboration. These antecedents are the factors that influence the level of virtual collaboration that can be achieved. In their work, they indicated that the antecedent for a successful virtual collaboration are; trust, shared understanding, degree of virtual collaboration and depth of relationship.

Figure 1: The antecedents of a successful virtual collaboration (Peter and Manz 118).

The advantages of virtual collaboration

Nemiro et al. (688) listed the following advantages of virtual collaboration;

They pointed out that virtual collaboration leads to greater commitment, it also leads to an improvement in the level of organizational viability, improvement of the level of workforce viability, it leads to a workforce which is more skilled, it also leads to a more responsible workforce. Virtual collaboration also leads to a high level of employee commitment. Virtual collaboration also enables people and workgroups to effectively communicate while working together on a common project while they are located in remote locations via the use of appropriate technology.

Virtual collaboration has also been indicated to lead to minimizing of the time that is spent in the interaction between managers and employees because there is no need to employ any paper-based administrative procedures that are time-consuming. Virtual collaboration also leads to a reduction in the administrative costs since the process sis paperless and also need no office space or transportation.

Disadvantages of virtual collaboration

Virtual collaboration has been noted by Warkentin, Sayeed and Hightower (977) to suffer from a reduced level of modalities. The first disadvantage is that it can not replicate the 'give and take' element of the traditional face-to-face discussions. The second one is that the richness of the information that is transmitted via virtual collaboration is reduced by the lack of verbal and non-verbal cues. The third one is that virtual teams has been indicated evidentially to be less effective than the traditional teams in communications Hightower and Sayeed (456b).Virtual collaboration has been shown to require an acquisition of computer hardware and software at a high cost as well as an initial training of staff at an extra cost. The concept can also not replace the interpersonal contact that is needed in every organization.

Conclusion

It is evident that the advent in technology is making the cost of running business lower as well as raising he level of efficiency of the workforce. More efforts should therefore be made by corporations to adopt virtual collaborative technologies in order for them to maintain profitability by lowering operational costs in these harsh economic times.