This is how we
have started communication with our virtual counterpart two months ago. During
our thirteen weeks journey of “High Performance Collaboration”, we have learned
how to formulate and work in a virtual team across culture and share knowledge
while resolving probable team conflict and work for mutual benefit ensuring a
win-win and such work in a highly efficient diversified efficient virtual work
team.
Throughout our
virtual team project our team had to work with another team, meeting virtually,
where we have observed all the topics we have covered and learned during our coursework
to generate high performance outcome.
I shall say that
our virtual team was beyond the restriction of social, cultural, demographic
and religious boundary and worked as a representative of global arena. Three
members of my own team are from three different countries are working in a
fourth country. When we have formed our team, we decided that we shall take the
advantage of multicultural learning and pick the best of each culture and work
on something that will suit for all the culture and country. Boris is a
symbolic representation of European zone or better to say western world who
loves freedom and wants to explore the charm of life. Nancy is a representative
of traditional Chinese female society (Fu, Wu & Ye, 2007). Her
introversion, politeness and avoidance represent the Hofestede’s findings of
Chinese cultural dimension (Hofstede, 1984). Me on the other hand is a
representative of Indian region what is mostly unknown to researchers,
therefore still people believe that people of that region are mostly snake
charmers and enchanters. That is how we have tried to learn from our own team members by taking the advantage of our diversified culture and knowledge.
The only
similarity we had in our group is our educational background and all of us were
from business school; however when we are formed in group with our virtual
group we have found that all of them are from engineering background.
Therefore, it became a simultaneous benefit and challenge to decide whether to
accommodate and compete, or collaborate or compromise among the team members
for a common goal (Sadri & Condia, 2012).
I think, we have
successfully managed the team by following a structured policy. We know that
working in virtual team has two core areas of restriction: infrastructure and
time. In the infrastructure section first and most important part is the
availability of good internet connection. In most of the countries, it is yet
not accessible, hence even many parts in Hong Kong, especially in the New
Territories, speed is not yet good enough. Even in the prominent areas, some providers
are unable to provide uninterrupted high speed service what we have faced
during our first meeting when Boris had to sign out in the middle of our
discussion because of the bad connection of the place.
Second important
infrastructure needed for such communication is the access and usage of common
medium. Different communication mediums are now been used, even from mobile
call, people can do a teleconferencing. In my first mail, I have mentioned
about the usage of facebook, QQ or Skype as our probable medium of
communication. I know, recently “wazzup” is one of the most preferred mobile
communication medium in Hong Kong and Chine but I am not a user of that.
Initially, our other group chooses QQ but I was more comfortable with facebook
and skype as I am not a good QQ user, neither Boris; therefore they agreed to
use skype for our support. Their support was visible in the comment of Nee,
when he informed us that his other two team members are seating with him and
downloading skype to communicate with us.
Other
restriction we face in virtual teamwork is the effective time management. When
to start and who will start. This is often a dilemma to find a convenient time
for all the team members. Initially, I have prepared a time management excel
format and sent it to the evening group to find their suitable meeting time.
Nee discussed with his team and replied the excel again market their free time
in yellow mark and such we came to know that they are free on next Thursday
from 1 to 5 p.m. and Friday, Saturday and Monday 1 to 3 p.m. and based on that
we decided on our available suitable time between those time period.
Virtual Integration
One of the major
learning of this course is to be updated with technological advancements and replace
physical with the cybernetic existence and replace vertical with virtual
integration (Magretta, 1998). To reduce the cost of physical setup and manage
time efficiently, people now are not going to physical office rather working
from home making a virtual home-office. In our team, we also practiced the
same. Going for meeting in CityU would waste my more than two hours of time
considering both way. It would also waste a significant time to my team members
as well what was replaced by the internet meeting and we integrated with each
other from home serving our purpose best.
Knowledge Management
Core of our
knowledge management practice was to find out our individual expertise and
assign tasks based on that expertise. When we initially, meet with the evening
group, the initial idea they came up with was to develop a mobile application
for ordering food from the restaurants. They are the engineers and have the
expert knowledge on this subject area. On the other hand, our team came up with
an idea to serve the community. Although we were not expert in community
service but my previous track of working in a NGO based banking company,
influenced me to think about doing something for people. My teammates accepted
this idea because it is a concern for the people across the world.
Second thing
worked well in our virtual team is our sharing mind with openness to accept the
criticism. All the team members were open to share their ideas about the project
and find the pros and cons of the topic while considering the opportunities and
threats. In our first meeting, when we came up with these two ideas, both of
morning and evening team were trying to find the beauty of the opposite team
and acceptance in the real world practice. We shared what are the problems
there might be in this project and relative cost-benefit analysis was been
done. As the knowledge we had was mostly the personal tacit knowledge, our
virtual meeting with open question and answer helped us to share and manage
them well.
The first room
of conflict created based on the question of task conflict of which project
should be accepted on the first meeting date and most of the team members were
in favor of developing mobile application as it was relatively understandable
topic to everyone; however changed to the community integration project after
initial presentation based on the class response on the higher acceptable
ground of interest.
Second conflict
raising section developed in our second meeting, based on process conflict,
when I started explaining the project to the team. As the topic was very new to
everyone, most of them started asking question about viability and
applicability while real life advantage and implacability for media benefit was
also under question. Nevertheless, all of them accepted the points and together
we have developed around 10-12 points and they behaved in more accommodating
way.
Third conflict
was raised when we divided our area of work and modified and extended our
earlier raised 10-12 points to formal 15 points from police point of view. The
media supporters identified them as fully police focused demand this time and
asked for modifications and they also raised their own 10 points. Finally we
had to decide together for using a collaborative approach what is explained in
the negotiation section.
Fourth conflict
rose because of the advancement of technology. Technology itself can be the
facilitator and interrupter simultaneously. Many features of PC is not
applicable in the Mac. When our other part of virtual team raised their points,
we have copied them in the word file and used the comment option to inform our
opinion; however that option is not available in Mac and such they could not
locate any comment there. They informed us and we sent it again but still they
could not locate it what made me competing with them that why they cannot see
while I can see that. There Nancy came as an accommodating member to talk to
them in QQ and send them personal message that it might be a problem of technology
and such it was resolved.
Negotiation
Most important
lesson I have learned from our negotiation class is to provide multiple offer
of same value and then choose a suitable one from them or combine few of them
together or based on the options, come up with a new option for win-win
situation of both the parties.
In the conflict
management section, I have mentioned that we have raised 15 points as police
representative and the evening section developed 10 more in response what
initiated a conflicting mode, resolved with a collaborative approach by
combining and accepting from both the pool and ensure a win-win for both of
police and media. In our blog, we have mentioned that we have taken 10 points
from police, 5 from media and 4 points developed combining both of their
concern and such ensured mutual benefit in the bargain zone.
Our second
negotiation point on cost sharing was a very intelligent and strategic
negotiation. At first we asked for 50-50 cost sharing between police and media
but media opposed and informed that as they have to pay themselves and police
payment comes from government, they cannot effort such cost and they asked for
70-30 cost sharing and later on we decided on 70-30 sharing in installation
cost but 50-50 in operational cost. The most interesting part here is the
discount for government purchase of installation machineries will be counted as
police cost and we have assumed around 25% discount from government. Therefore
the actual cost will be 45-30.
Another
negotiation process we have followed here was applying a different option when
the previous option becomes ambiguous. We raised a point that a media person
cannot leave job in the middle of a case as s/he might have some important
information what was opposed by other team and they wanted to remove this point
for ensuring the job protection right of the media staffs. Therefore, we have
come up with a supplementary idea to remove this point but serve the same
purpose.
Creativity Development
In our blog, we
have mentioned that from a study on creativity, it is been revealed that people
working in a distant place with diverse people can be more creative and working
in a foreign location could make it more creative. We all have worked within
the boundary of Hong Kong hence, worked with the people from different nation
and culture with different background. Moreover, ideas from diversified people
helped us to think rationally and also out of the box; therefore, the initial
idea of evening group of developing mobile application for restaurant was used
for developing mobile application for communication and tracking of respective
police officer or media personnel.
We had the trust
among each other in the team that we could perform a good job in the course and
above all we had trust on ourselves that we are on the right track that leaded
us to the successful completion of project. In the virtual team, developing
trust is very difficult as there is no eye contact to transfer the confidence among
each other therefore, we needed some support from the real world as well and
that was the acceptance of our work from real world people. When we presented
our both the theme, the one accepted undoubtedly built our trust on that and
lead us to develop high performance result on that topic.
Although we did not have any leader in the virtual team but in different time different person took control over the discussion and lead the discussion. Like LMX theory, we already had two subgroups within our team and each of us were focused on our individual group outcomes and tried to lead our own subgroups first and then the virtual team as a whole. We have decided the role taking and making based on our expertise and allocated among each other and roles leaders roles were rotated in time in the raise of new points. We have performed internal task focused team leadership actions based on focusing on goal, structuring results, decision making and above all focusing on quality of work we are doing.
Bad Effects
We know from
theory that there are five main stage of team performance: forming, storming,
norming, performing and adjourning but these stages can revolve among each
other. Storming can rise again after norming or during performing. We have
observed in our virtual team that norming in our team came after forming and
skipping storming. It is obvious that some level of little storming was there
always but that could not effect on our performance that much.
Most negative impact
generated from our virtual team was lack of development of inter-personal
communicational relationship. We could not share our emotion openly and such
missed the sweetness of internal relationship development what creates some
sorts of sense of isolation (VTSR, 2010).
Another problem
we have faced in the virtual team is showing our non-verbal ques. There are
many things that we express in gesture without saying a thing what was missing
in our virtual team.
Conclusion
In the last
thirteen weeks, we have learned about the three levels of performance
improvement matrix: personal level, team level and organizational level. With the
advancement of technology and intensity of competition, people are now moving
into the hi-tech virtual era for communication and work together. Practice of
knowledge management and working in a collaborative form with a mutual winning
environment is the core of best performance outcomes what we have observed and
practiced during our journey in the virtual team project.
References:
Fu P. P, Wu R.,
Ye Y. Y. J, “Chinese Culture and Leadership”, Culture and Leadership Across the
World, 2007
Hofstede, G., “Culture's
Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values”, SAGE
Publications, 1984
Sadri, G. and
Condia, J, “Managing the Virtual World”, Industrial Management, 2012
Handy, C., “Trust
and the Virtual Organization”, Harvard Business Review, 1995
Magretta, J., “The
Power of Virtual Integration: An Interview with Dell Computer’s Michele Dell”,
Harvard Business Review, 1998
Goldfien, J. H.,
& Robbennolt, J. K., “What if the lawyers have their way? An empirical assessment
of conflict strategies and attitudes toward mediation styles”. Ohio State
Journal on Dispute Resolution, 2007
“Challenges to
Work in Virtual Teams”, Virtual Team Survey Report, 2010
