Critical Success Factors for Virtual Teams
February 12, 2025
Various organizations have laid down principles for risk management. There are risk management principles by International standardization Organization and by Project Management Body of Knowledge. The Project management body of knowledge (PMBOK) has laid down 12 principles. This article carries an amalgamation of both PMBOK and ISO principles. The various principles are: Organizational Context: Every […]
This module has covered the various aspects of change management and the roles played by senior management as well as the CEO in top down change and the role of employees at all levels in bottom up change. This article looks at the role played by “support functions” in an organization in facilitating change. Specifically, […]
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Decision Making in the Digital Age The Digital Age is well and truly upon us. With it, many changes are happening both in the external landscape in which businesses operate as well as the internal dynamics of decision making. Indeed, it would be an understatement to say that Decision Making […]
Action Research is a useful method for facilitating organizational change by collaborating and involving the client in the entire process of diagnostic, problem identification, experiential learning, and problem-solving process. The entire process of action research is action oriented with the objective of making the change happen successfully. The process equally involves experimentation with the various […]
An organization is formed to achieve certain goals and objectives by bringing individuals together on a common platform and motivating them to deliver their level best. It is essential for the employees to enjoy at the workplace for them to develop a sense of loyalty towards it. Work culture plays an important role in extracting […]
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.
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *