Critical Success Factors for Virtual Teams
February 12, 2025
Loss of Trust and Faith and the Rise of Populists Public trust and faith in institutions is at an all time low. Starting with the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 in the United States and then the Sovereign Debt Crisis in Europe in 2009, including the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, and the election […]
All leaders do not possess same attitude or same perspective. As discussed earlier, few leaders adopt the carrot approach and a few adopt the stick approach. Thus, all of the leaders do not get the things done in the same manner. Their style varies. The leadership style varies with the kind of people the leader […]
A loss distribution approach is a common approach followed by risk management practitioners in order to identify and evaluate the possible risks that they are likely to face in the due course of business. The loss distribution approach has actually been designed by the actuarial practitioners who work in the insurance industry. It is for […]
There are many new and different types of arrangements that are used in the reinsurance industry. Captive insurance is one such unique arrangement. Captive insurance is actually a part of an elaborate corporate strategy for many companies. It has also spawned different arrangements such as fronting. It is important to understand what captive insurance is […]
The Advocacy versus the Activist Role Non-profits around the world typically are divided into those that undertake grassroots activism and those that advocate ideological positions and those that combine these two aspects to work for the betterment of society. This means that many nonprofits like the Red Cross and Oxfam are activist and advocacy oriented […]
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 *