Virtual work team dynamics and collaboration

Virtual Team

Your Role on the Virtual Work Team

As a member of a virtual team, I had several different roles. The most critically important to the team is being a contributor to the project itself and also helping to decide which tasks were to be done in the best possible order to meet the deadlines. 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). 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). Given the fact that many members of the virtual team experienced the same progression indicates how positive and productive the overall experience has been.

Each of these roles are explained in greater detail throughout this paper. Beginning first with the role of participant and content contributor, my role initially was to provide my part of assignments and create content and information for others in the team to work with so we could all reach the virtual team's goals together. My most important part of this role was making sure deadlines were attained and also to strive for the highest quality possible. In creating content to share with a virtual team over time I realized that it would be the quality of the document and its appearance that would do what I would typically do if I walked into a team meeting in person. Instead of being able to explain what I had done in person, I quickly realized that the content and information would need to stand on its own.

As I progressed through contributing to the team I also realized that e-mail was effective only to a point and over time disabled more collaboration than enabled it. It would have been much better to have had online tools including a real-time blackboard or electronic space to write down and share files in real-time without having to wait on e-mail for everyone to get the attachments. Also, the ability to collaborate in real time, the next step in the virtual team process, would have been much more effective with better electronic tools. 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)