Critical Success Factors for Virtual Teams
February 12, 2025
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Global Virtual Team work structure is fast emerging as the workplace reality in networked organizations. Global virtual teams (GVT) are defined as the work groups where members are located at different global locations and communicate mainly through information and communication technology (ICT).
For an effective virtual team, role coordination is very important. Role coordination is defined as managing the interdependent tasks of virtual team members. Role coordination among the members of a virtual team is a challenge because of the following three main reasons:
Role Theory as its focal point, this article aims to look at the different roles played by virtual team members and how virtual teams should achieve effective role coordination among its members.
Role in the context of a team is defined as the part played or expected to be played by an individual member. According to the Role Theory, the actions of each individual are guided by his place in social structure. Every member expects a set of behaviors from themselves and others in this social setting. Here we need to realize that in a group, each individual exhibits two types of behaviors - task-related as well as socio-emotional behaviors.
In a virtual team, members play three types of roles:
Global virtual teams rely on ICT tools for any form of interactions among its members. The members can use various ICT tools for three levels of communication.
Thus we see that in order to ensure successful collaboration and knowledge sharing among virtual team members, it is important for every member to efficiently perform the task-oriented and socio-emotional roles and avoid negative individual roles. The virtual team leader should reduce role ambiguity by clearly defining the roles and responsibilities of each member as well as improve role coordination by providing effective communication mechanisms in place and encouraging communication at all the three levels.
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