As teams and an organization grows beyond one
single office location into various multiple locations or most often across
multiple countries, different time zones or downsizing, reorganizing to reduce
labor costs, eliminate redundancy, and better target scarce resources. To avoid
these circumstance concept of virtual teams comes to play.
A virtual
team, is a group of people those who interact through various electronic medias.
It also known as a geographically dispersed team or remote team. Team members
of a virtual team are usually located in different geographical locations. Strong and trusted
method of communication should be much need to success of every virtual team
since it is not a human being. This is also known as “Global Team" .
The
Different Types of Virtual Teams
There
are several types of virtual teams depending on the lifespan, objective, goals,
and roles of members.
v
Networked Teams - Team composed
of cross functional members to share expertise and knowledge on a specific
issue.
v
Parallel Teams - These types of
teams are generally formed by the same organization to developments in process
or system for a short period of time and membership is constant.
v
Product Development Teams - This is developing to specially oriented
task such as new product, information system, or organizational process.
v
Production Teams - This types of teams created from members of one role
coming together to perform regular and ongoing work with clearly defined roles
and work independently.
v
Service
Teams - Members from different time
zones are included. For example, customer support teams in USA finish their
shift while support teams in Asia start their shift and continue the
work.
v
Management Teams - These types of teams created by managers of
the same organization who assigned to different geographical regions.
Cohesiveness of a virtual team
Cohesiveness is “The quality of
forming a united whole”. The word it says cohesiveness plays vital role
in team performance as well as the global team. Turning selected individuals to
group which truly works together by building
team cohesion is a major challenge faced by any organization.
Team cohesion is when a group of individuals feel connected and
drive through achieve common goal. Members of the team should respect to other
in the team and also equally contribute, support to each other and always work
with the team. When it comes to virtual teams team members should pay more
attention since the physical interaction is at a minimum level. Increasing team cohesion naturally helps organization to boost employee engagement by creating positive relationships, team goals, and
shared values that increase commitment.
REFERANCES
Richard
L.Daft “New era of Management.” Human
Resource Management :384-385;
Vijay Govindaraj and Anil K Gupta, “Building an
effective Global Business Team,” MIT Sloan Management Review 42,no 4 63-71.
Sadri and Condia, “Managing the Virtual World,”
Virtual teams allow companies to look for talent beyond their home country. Specialists and specialists from all over the world are working together for this project. As the organization's human capital increases their knowledge of global and local markets, as well as sharing best business practices, knowledge sharing and innovation increase, virtual teams have several other advantages. High productivity, time saving, new opportunities are some of them.
ReplyDeleteAccording to the authors Linack and Stamps, a virtual team is a group of people working across time and space and organizational boundaries using technology to communicate and collaborate. As such, virtual teams allow organizations to bring together people with the best expertise, regardless of where they live. You have effectively talked about different types of virtual teams and cohesiveness of virtual team.
ReplyDeleteThe virtual teams will be very useful for situations like the current pandemic.
ReplyDelete