What is Personnel Administration ?
Employees form the core and the backbone of any organization and public organizations are no different. According to authors William Mosher and J. Donald Kingsley, the key to better governance lies in effective personnel management. For effective personnel administration there are certain criteria that need to be fulfilled like: Highly qualified workforce of civil servants […]
Accounting for Reinsurance Contracts
Reinsurance contracts tend to be very complicated. As we have already studied in the previous articles, a wide variety of complicated structures with various cash flow probabilities are associated with reinsurance contracts. Hence, it needs to be understood that the complicated nature of these reinsurance contracts sometimes ends up creating complicated accounting policies as well. […]
Team Building – Meaning, Exercises and its Need
When individuals with similar interest, attitude, and taste come together to work for a common objective, a team is formed. Every individual contributes equally and performs his level best to meet the team targets and achieve the organization’s goal. Team members strive hard to live up to the expectations of others and successfully accomplish the […]
Decision Making: How much does Hierarchy Matter?
In the contemporary business world, many companies have layers and layers of hierarchy where decisions are made at the top and passed down to the rank and file employees. This gives rise to organizational structures that are vertically deep and horizontally broad with spans of control extending to several layers in both ways. It is […]
Blake and Moutons Managerial Grid
The treatment of task orientation and people orientation as two independent dimensions was a major step in leadership studies. Many of the leadership studies conducted in the 1950s at the University of Michigan and the Ohio State University focused on these two dimensions. Building on the work of the researchers at these Universities, Robert Blake […]
Politics is an inevitable phenomenon faced by the employees in any workplace - virtual or collocated. The personal agenda of individuals in terms of career aspirations and motivations to work as well as organizational culture are the key determinants of workplace politics. Political processes can be either overt where the organizational hierarchy is rigid or covert in less bureaucratic organizations. Overt or covert, both types of political processes are detrimental to the organizational health.
Members of virtual teams adopt different influence tactics to impact team decisions. Influence tactics adopted by virtual team members affect:
All this have direct impact on the productivity and effectiveness of global virtual team. Therefore, it is one of the most important responsibilities of virtual team leader to understand as well as manage politics in the virtual workspace.
There are different types of influence tactics such as assertiveness, rational persuasion, consultation, pressure, blocking, upward appeal etc. exhibited by the members during their interactions with others. Following four factors largely determine the intensity and choice of influence tactics by the virtual team members:
Thus we see virtual teams witness less intense and interpersonal means of influencing rather than unhealthy competitive ones. An exception to this rule occurs when members of same geographical area form coalition and hold discussion outside the formal group interactions.
Though virtual team members experience politics but in a comparatively subtle way. In fact, virtual team leaders can minimize any signs of politics by establishing flatter hierarchy and promoting cultural sensitivity. Thus we see the basic characteristics of global virtual teams like multicultural, physical distance and constrained communication keep the emergence of team politics under control.
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