How to Manage a Virtual Team Effectively

Introduction: What Makes a Virtual Team

Developing a virtual team is more than just assembling a global group of experts who have proven they can work autonomously on complex tasks while also contributing to broader project-team goals. It is also more than a matter of assigning a specific mission or strategic objective — often knowledge-based and highly time-constrained. Such tasks include competitive analysis, pricing analysis, programming, or other highly specialized work that can be accomplished by a single contributor within an organization.

What is critical for the formation of a virtual team is the ability to create high levels of trust among team members and between members and their leader (Shipley, Johnson, & Hashemi, 2009). Transformational leadership styles that seek to maximize each team member's potential — and to shield the team from unproductive organizational politics — are essential (Purvanova & Bono, 2009). Virtual team leaders face exceptionally high expectations as a result and must continually progress from transactional toward transformational approaches to management (Siebdrat, Hoegl, & Ernst, 2009).

Building Trust and Transformational Leadership

It is very challenging to build a successful virtual team and integrate its operations into a broader organization in a way that minimizes politics and maximizes contributions. Yet within any organization this can be achieved through strategies that grant virtual team members meaningful autonomy and pair them with leaders who are honest and transparent while simultaneously demanding enough self-discipline from individual contributors to ensure work gets done.

This represents a classic balance of McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y approaches to management (Sager, 2008). On one hand, a virtual team manager must cultivate a sufficient sense of ownership in the shared objectives to achieve genuine internalization of those goals by team members (Wakefield, Leidner, & Garrison, 2008). On the other hand, there must also be a sense of duty, work ethic, and responsibility to the team as a whole (Sager, 2008).

Balancing Autonomy and Accountability

Managing virtual teams is infinitely more complex than managing co-located teams, precisely because of this dynamic. When managing teams in a physical location, the dimensions of work focus and output can be more easily observed and audited when a manager chooses to do so. In a virtual environment, however, the relationship rests on an implied foundation of trust, and the manager must continually work to keep this aspect of each subordinate relationship positive and open (Shipley, Johnson, & Hashemi, 2009).

To question a virtual team member's commitment without just cause risks undermining the trust of the entire team. The foundational premise of any successful virtual team is trust — between team members and between members and their manager. Doubting the intentions of team members invites isolationism and, if sustained, can lead to the fragmentation and eventual dissolution of the group (Sager, 2008).

Complexity of Remote Performance Management

This is a delicate balance for any manager to maintain. Significant weekly results are expected from the team, yet when a virtual team member is underperforming, strategies for improving productivity differ substantially from those used in an office setting. Above all, maintaining trust while acting as a supportive, transitional leader — rather than an autocratic and demanding one — is critically important (Wakefield, Leidner, & Garrison, 2008). Only by adopting this type of management style can a virtual team leader hope to be effective.

The upside, of course, is that virtual team members typically possess remarkable skills and often put in considerably more hours than office-based workers. This is frequently because their roles as spouses, parents, and professionals overlap within the same home, and their job becomes an increasingly central part of their identity. For virtual team members, the relative predictability of their work may serve as a sanctuary from the more chaotic, less ordered environment of home life — particularly when young children are present.

Research on virtual team dynamics consistently highlights that this blurring of professional and personal boundaries shapes how members relate to their work and to each other, making the manager's role in sustaining motivation and cohesion all the more significant.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that the manager of any virtual team must continually strive to keep team members involved and focused, and most of all, identifying with the key objectives and programs of the team itself. This is why transformational leadership is so critically important in the long-term management of virtual teams.

References

Purvanova, R., & Bono, J. (2009). Transformational leadership in context: Face-to-face and virtual teams. Leadership Quarterly, 20(3), 343.

Sager, K. (2008). An exploratory study of the relationships between Theory X/Y assumptions and superior communicator style. Management Communication Quarterly: McQ, 22(2), 288.

Shipley, M., Johnson, M., & Hashemi, S. (2009). Cognitive learning style and its effects on the perception of learning, satisfaction and social interactions in virtual teams. Journal of American Academy of Business, Cambridge, 14(2), 17–27.

Siebdrat, F., Hoegl, M., & Ernst, H. (2009). How to manage virtual teams. MIT Sloan Management Review, 50(4), 63–68.

Wakefield, R., Leidner, D., & Garrison, G. (2008). A model of conflict, leadership, and performance in virtual teams. Information Systems Research, 19(4), 434–455, 516–518.