Global virtual teams

The study departs from the norm by investigating how attitudes and subjective norms conceptualized through the aggregated and disaggregated approaches predict intentions to purchase funeral products, as well as how the effects differ between groups based on past purchase behaviour. A structured questionnaire was self-administered to a purposeful sample of 500 Christians in Gaborone, Botswana, of which 457 (i.e., 91%) were useful responses. The findings of the aggregated approach show that both attitudes and subjective norms significantly and positively affect purchase intentions of funeral products. The effects are more evident for those who have purchased funeral products before, while the purchase intentions of those who have not purchased funeral products are influenced by subjective norms only. However, the findings based on the disaggregated approach reflect that motivation to comply is the most dominant, significant and positive predictor of intentions to purchase funeral products. Further results indicate that the intentions of those who have purchased funeral products before were significantly and positively influenced by evaluations, normative beliefs and motivation to comply, while the intentions of non-purchasers were only influenced significantly and positively by their motivation to comply. Thus, motivation to comply serves as a significant and positive predictor of intentions regardless of past purchase behaviour. The results imply that various components of attitudes and subjective norms affect intentions differently, and variations do exist in the effects according to the groups' past purchase behaviour. This study adopts a consumer behaviour perspective in offering insight into Christian burial rituals. By applying the Theory of Reasoned Action, the link between intentions and its predictors is investigated, which extends the literature about the purchase of funeral products beyond the study of spending behaviour. Its concentration on Christians in Botswana also provides a good starting point for highlighting the role of religiosity on the purchase of funeral products, while embracing an understudied society.

As technology reshapes the nature of the workplace, many employees find themselves working on some form of a virtual team. But many of these employees complain that their teams
are frustrating, time-consuming, and ineffective. To overcome these challenges, companies must evaluate the Virtual Distance in their organizations and identify how and where groups are struggling. With this information they can develop a solution roadmap that promotes more effective communication and creates targeted strategies for addressing physical, operational, and affinity distance.

Virtual Distance is a multidimensional perceptual construct resulting from key elements that promote a sense of distance in e-collaborative work environments. Why will Virtual Distance help to uncover some of the potential downside risks of collaboration using virtual and outsourced resources? Research has shown that the perceived distance between two or more individuals has negative effects on communication and persuasion and promotes a tendency to deceive more than those who do not perceive themselves to be as distant (Bradner and Mark 2002). Virtual team
members and work groups are, by definition, distant from one another, not only in the physical sense but in other ways as well. Socio-emotional factors, for example, can play a role in perceived distance and these factors may contribute to decreased success
(Barczak and McDonough 2003).

The Virtual Distance Model (VDM) was developed after conducting an extensive literature review and combining findings from that effort with executive interview information collected over the course of the first 18 months of this research. The model
was tested using a multi-step research method including surveys and follow-up interviews with key executives from a sample of corporations leveraging virtual workspaces.

Giriş Küreselleşmenin etkileri günlük hayatta bir çok noktada görüldüğü gibi, iş dünyasına da yansımaktadır. Küreselleşme, yeni çalışma biçimlerini tetikleyen bir unsur olarak, " Sanal Takım " kavramının da ortaya çıkmasında önemli bir rol üstlenmiştir. Bugün özellikle çok uluslu şirketler için bir gereklilik halini alan sanal takımların kurulması, sanal olmayan takımlarınkine göre oldukça güçtür. İşte, bu noktada liderin gücü, elde edilecek başarının belirleyicilerinden birisi olacaktır. Gerek sanal takımlar kurulmadan önceki üst yönetime mal edilebilecek çabaların, gerekse kurulduktan sonraki genellikle daha operasyonel düzeydeki liderlik çabalarının, bir sanal takım kültürünün organizasyona yerleştirilmesi ve bu kültürün etkinliğinin sağlanmasında önemli bir rolü vardır. 1. Sanal Takım Kavramı Sanal takımlar; sanal olmayan takımlardan farklı olarak organizasyon duvarlarını ve zaman-mekan sınırlarını bilgisayar ve iletişim teknolojilerinden aldıkları güçle aşan takımlardır[1]. Sanal takım kavramını daha iyi anlayabilmek için, kavramı oluşturan kelimelerin kökenine inmek daha doğru olacaktır. Günlük hayatta sanal sıfatı daha ziyade varolmayan veya gerçek olmayan bazı objeleri nitelemek amacıyla kullanılmaktadır. Oysa bir takımı sanal kılan gerçekte onun varolmaması değil; işleyişi sırasında kullandığı bilgisayar ve iletişim teknolojileridir. Bir takıma sanal sıfatının yakıştırılmasına neden olan üç temel faktör vardır: Üyelerin takıma katıldıkları coğrafi mekan ve zaman dilimi anlamındaki farklılıkları, üyelerin ait oldukları kurum bağlamındaki değişkenlikleri ve üyelerin takımın görevlerini ve sosyal etkileşimlerini yerine getirirlerken bilgisayar ve iletişim teknolojilerini kullanma düzeyleri[2]. Bu üç unsurdan en önemlisi ve takımın sanal kimlik taşıması için kati surette gerekli olan, takımın görevlerini yerine getirirken iletişim ve bilgisayar teknolojilerini kullanmasıdır. Yani iletişim ve bilgisayar teknolojilerini takımın görevleri doğrultusunda kullanmayan takımlar sanal takım olarak kabul görmemektedirler. Diğer iki unsur, yani coğrafi mekan ve zaman dilimi anlamındaki farklılıklar ve bireylerin takıma geldikleri organizasyon bazındaki farklılıkları zorunluluk şartı kapsamında değillerdir. Yani bu iki unsur sağlanmadığı takdirde de bir takım, sanal takım hüviyeti taşıyabilmektedir. Öte yandan bu iki unsurunda takımın özellikleri içerisinde yer alması veya almaması takımın sanallaşma düzeyini de yoğun biçimde etkilemektedir. Bir takım; iletişim ve bilgisayar teknolojilerini takım görevleri doğrultusunda ne kadar çok kullanırsa, üyelerin takıma geldikleri zaman dilimi, mekan ve organizasyonlar ne kadar farklılık gösterirse takımın sanallaşma derecesi de bir o kadar

Geographically distributed work has become a popular way to work. Past CSCW research has shown that remote workers rely on innovative communication platforms but still face challenges being remote. Research has also provided organizational and managerial strategies to bridge the distance gap. Our study in contrast investigates how individuals develop strategies to cope with the daily challenges of working remotely and alone, and what managers can do to help them. We interviewed seventeen individuals involved in remote work about their experiences, identifying unique challenges and their workarounds. Our interview results suggest that, although people may work alone, the process of conducting distributed work is actually very social. Individual remote workers establish a unique kind of work rhythm, visibility management for evaluation, social support infrastructure, and personal connection as a part of their coping strategies to balance their professional and personal lives.

New product development (NPD) projects are costly, and fragile against failures as compared to other structures. This study has a holistic view of team factors to examine their relationship with team communication. Communication contributes to technical and practical processes such as learning, new idea development, and creativity. Trust has become prominent by affecting outcomes and processes indirectly, and changing relationships within team. This paper attempted to offer a contribution to the technology and innovation management (TIM) literature by presenting a model for researchers and project managers to understand potential interrelationships among team level factors (team autonomy, stability, member experience, and empowerment), team trust, and team formal and informal communication in NPD teams.

Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST) is relevant to today's organizations due to the expanding influence that advancing technologies have had with regard to the human-computer interaction aspect of AST and its implications on socio-biologically inspired structuration. This literature review presents examples of advances in information technology that are driving organizational changes in the areas of business alignment, IT planning, and development that show how AST is being used to study this driving force of advancing technologies within organizations. We also investigate how AST relates to complexity theory of organizational structure, in order to better understand how advancing information technologies influence the structure, modality, and interaction of social systems, team dynamics, and organizations. To gain a better understanding of the individual adaptation of IT and how the adaptation of IT by the business sector drives organizational change within the company in today's digital age, it was necessary for us to investigate such concepts as virtual team dynamics, the integration of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) into academe, the investigation of AST as a Meta-Theory for examining IS within organizations, contextual and organizational elements of AST in Group Support System (GSS) research, group decision making, the geographic dispersion in teams, the Enterprise Systems of induced organizational change, the study of IT effects on individuals and organizations, and technology-mediated learning within organizations.

We study authentic leadership as a prominent but problematic example of positive leadership that we use as a more general “warning” against the current fashion of excessive positivity in leadership studies. Without trying to cover “everything”, we critically examine the principal tenets of mainstream authentic leadership theory and reveal a number of fundamental flaws: shaky philosophical and theoretical foundations, tautological reasoning, weak empirical studies, nonsensical measurement tools, unsupported knowledge claims and a generally simplistic and out of date view of corporate life. Even though our study focuses on authentic leadership, much of our criticism is also applicable to other popular positive leadership theories, such as transformational, servant, ethical and spiritual leadership.

Over the last two decades, various management theorists have shifted their research attention from top-down authority organizations to self-managed organizations that run in the absence of hierarchies. At the same time, the importance of conflict management is increasingly acknowledged in literature, with research direction moving towards the analysis of conflict management strategies at group/team level. Combining these research interests and directions, the author executed a research on Conflict management in Self-managed team, by studying the case of Wikipedia - a phenomenal online success for a self-managed collaborative organization. This study takes into account, besides the self-management structure, the attributes of Wikipedia as a virtual team with cultural diversity. The purpose of this research is twofold. First, it identifies the components that make up Wikipedia‟s conflict resolution process and observes how these components interact to form an effective conflict resolution system. Second, this research analyses the norms and regulations with regards to managing conflicts on Wikipedia and identifies the conflict management style at the group level. Two findings of the research: (1) Wikipedia conflict resolution system meets the criteria for a complementary system, in which components interact and address the limitations of one another, (2) The principal conflict management style of Wikipedia is an integrative style built on individual‟s collaborating and compromising conflict-handling behaviour, exhibited by a wide range of functional conflict resolution strategies. This research reveals the impact of organizational culture, reflected in community norms, on knowledge management in Wikipedia and highlights the effectiveness of its conflict management approach, reinforcing Wikipedia‟s role as an exemplary model of an extreme self-managed team.

Prezentacija na gore spomenuti naslov - obrađuje se tematika kako ljudi rade u timovima, da li je takav način rada efikasniji naspram pojedinačnog. Također, prikazano je istraživanje provedeno nad studentima kako bi se potvrdile iznesene hipoteze.

Multicultural teams are task-oriented groups from different national cultures that are often involved in dynamic, project based arrangements. They are fast becoming the norm in businesses
and NGOs worldwide. The study examined team member’s stereotypes as embedded in the complex environment that characterizes global teams. It contributes to the scarce research on stereotypes as embedded in contexts. The study explored the stereotypes of
120 Israelis and 80 Indians working in the high-tech industry.
The conceptual frameworks of convergence, divergence and crossvergence and social identity theory provided the backdrop for the study’s hypotheses.
The quantitative findings documented the existence of crossvergence in global and national stereotypes and of in-group favoritism. The qualitative findings revealed that Israelis and Indians created mirror pictures of two basic stereotype categories: work related
and personal characteristic.

Resilience, or the capacity to bounce back from adversity strengthened and more resourceful, can be considered an important quality of virtual teams in the contemporary working world. A team is the basic organizational unit many modern firms are composed of—and, the virtual ones are those conducting teamwork over distance using a combination of telecommunications and information technologies to accomplish an organizational task. Yet, we know little about how these teams with members who rarely meet in person can build resilience. We develop further the notion of resilience from the traditional focus on significant adversity to also include mundane yet crucial events that can become key for building resilience in virtual teams. Our study focuses on team dynamics and builds on an experimental research setting using a longitudinal, qualitative and interpretative research design to examine five anatomically similar, well-performing virtually working teams over their life cycle. Our findings show that team members in two out of the five teams engaged in specific reflection and action mechanisms—self-reflective practices, regulation of emotional expression and engagement in concrete actions promoting team inclusion—that in turn helped these teams become more robust and prepared to face new adversities. Implications for practice and research are discussed.

A vast majority of research on global virtual work focuses on the struggles for workers as they navigate geographic, cultural, language, and time zone differences. Our research suggests that, despite these struggles, global virtual work may offer significant benefits to workers. We interviewed 78 engineers about their experiences of working globally and then surveyed 515 knowledge workers who worked either with globally distributed or exclusively collocated colleagues. Global virtual work was associated with workers' positive appraisal of the work's complexity and learning potential, which, in turn, improved innovation , satisfaction, and engagement. These effects, however, relied on workers' off-job recovery between workdays.

Employees and management are a team. The corporate safety culture within the corporate culture's vision must be adopted unanimously by the team. A positive Zero Lost time Injury Safety Program is a wonderful vehicle to drive the corporate safety culture to new levels of success.

The next levels for management's consideration would be Zero Harm.

It is all about Achievements: big, small and in between! Zero Lost Time Injury Safety is all about achievements: day by day and week by week, month by month and year by year....

The professional risk manager has a wonderful tool to present to management: A WIN, WIN SITUATION!

Top managers have a WIN, WIN SITUATION!

EVERYONE IS A WINNER!

Even when a lost time accident does occur, the very next day, the safety achievements began anew!

With the Achievements will come recognition as Awards and Rewards.

The outsourcing of software development projects has lead to the emergence of global virtual teams. However, the use of outsourcing strategies and consequently the establishment of global virtual teams by multinational corporations have had mixed reviews even though they often create access to a wider talent pool and sometimes at more affordable labor costs. This is the case because it is difficult to maintain a good performance level for those teams. This study utilized the framework from Kunze and Brahm as a guide and then expanded on it to explore factors that influence performance in global virtual teams: team cohesion, goal setting, task conflict, awareness climate, trust climate, leadership, and shared understanding. The study found that in addition to the aforementioned factors, collaboration, communication and cultural diversity also influenced performance in the global virtual teams. The findings are important because when a team's leadership has a better understanding of where they need to focus their energy in order to promote optimal performance, they can make informed decisions regarding plans and strategies to achieve that performance. The study thus offers important insight on the factors that could be nurtured and mitigated within an outsourced software development environment in order for global virtual teams to achieve and maintain a good performance level

When implementing software development in a global environment, a popular strategy is the establishment of virtual teams. The objective of this paper is to examine the effective project management of this type of team. In the virtual team environment problems arise due to the collaborative nature of software development and the impact distance introduces. Distance specifically impacts coordination, visibility, communication and cooperation within a virtual team. In these circumstances the project management of a virtual team must be carried out in a different manner to that of a team in a single-site location. Results from this research highlighted six specific project management related areas that need to be addressed to facilitate successful virtual team operation. Organizational structure, risk management, infrastructure, process, conflict management and team structure and organization. Additional related areas are the sustained support of senior management and the provision of effective infrastructure.

This study seeks to understand to what extent and in what contexts women leaders may be advantageous for teams. More specifically, this study examines how team leader gender relates to team cohesion, cooperative learning, and participative communication. Furthermore, the study argues that advantages derived from female leadership may be contingent on teams’ coordination requirements. I propose that as teams’ coordination requirements increase (i.e., with functional diversity, size, and geographic dispersion), teams with women leaders report more cohesion and more cooperative and participative interaction norms than those with men leaders. I aggregated survey responses from the members of 82 teams in 29 organizations at the team level. Findings from hierarchical linear modeling analyses suggest that female leadership is more positively associated with cohesion on larger and more functionally diverse teams and more positively associated with cooperative learning and participative communication on larger and geographically dispersed teams. These results call for more research on boundary conditions on the relationship between leader gender and team outcomes, on the role of relational leadership on complex and diverse teams, and, ultimately, on the potential mediating role of cohesion and team interaction norms on the relationship between leader gender and team performance.

Organizations are under pressure to meet the increasingly rapid changes in society. The major use of technology for information management makes a new way of managing teams is created as an alternative, in some projects, the teams traditional software factory. The new format called virtual teams is applied to address these needs. A comparison of traditional and virtual teams is highlighted. Despite some inconveniences, the virtual team can be applied in situations where the required competencies to the project are not available nearby geographical organization. The coexistence of traditional and virtual teams is possible.

As organizações sofrem pressões para atender as mudanças cada vez mais rápidas da sociedade. A grande utilização de tecnologia para o gerenciamento de informação faz com que uma nova forma de gestão de equipes seja criada como alternativa, em alguns projetos, das equipes tradicionais de fábrica de software. O novo formato denominado equipes virtuais é aplicada para suprir essas necessidades. A comparação das equipes tradicionais e virtuais é evidenciada. Apesar de algumas inconveniências, a equipe virtual pode ser aplicada em situações em que a competência requerida ao projeto não está disponível nas proximidades geográficas da organização. A convivência de equipes tradicionais e virtuais é possível.

Increased global competitions have urged small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to develop new products faster. Virtual research and development (R&D) teams in SMEs can offer a solution to speed up time-to-market of new product development (NPD). However, factors that affect the effectiveness of virtual teams for NPD are still not adequately verified. This book presents the correlations between virtual R&D team constructs and virtual team effectiveness by developing a “Virtual Research and Development Team” (ViR&DT) model. The items, which may influence the effectiveness of virtual teams, are taken from the literature. Through an online survey and by application of structural equation modeling (SEM) technique, the proposed model (ViR&DT) has been tested. The results suggest that the process construct is strongly correlated to the effectiveness of virtual teams. Therefore, NPD managers in virtual R&D teams should concentrate on the process of new product development rather than simply equipping the teams with the latest technology or employing highly qualified experts. Further empirical research is recommended to fully explore and appreciate the breadth of application of the ViR&DT model. This paper is a part of my PhD journey.

Globally distributed information systems development has become a key strategy for large sections of the software industry. This involves outsourcing projects to third parties or offshoring development to divisions in remote locations. A popular approach when implementing these strategies is the establishment of virtual teams. The justification for embarking on this approach is to endeavor to leverage the potential benefits of labor arbitrage available between geographical locations. When implementing such a strategy organizations must recognize that virtual teams operate differently to collocated teams, therefore, they must be managed differently. These differences arise due to the complex and collaborative nature of information systems development and the impact distance introduces. Geographical, temporal, cultural, and linguistic distance all negatively impact on coordination, cooperation, communication, and visibility in the virtual team setting. In these circumstances, it needs to be recognized that the project management of a virtual team must be carried out in a different manner to that of a collocated team. Results from this research highlight six specific project management areas, which need to be addressed to facilitate successful virtual team operation. They are: Organizational Virtual Team Strategy, Risk Management, Infrastructure, Implementation of a Virtual Team Process, Team Structure and Organization, and Conflict Management.

Contemporary expert organizations rely heavily on cross-border, often temporary teams typically working through virtual means of communication. While static aspects of teams are well researched, there have been considerably less studies on team dynamics and team processes. Existing process studies tend to take a cautious, entity-based approach, emphasizing team structure as much as (or even more than) processual aspects. This paper represents a shift from studying teams as entities and structures changing over time to studying teams as an on-going process. Participants engage in teaming and thus in the continued making and sometimes unmaking of teams. We report on a study of three anatomically similar, self-managed teams performing the same set of complex tasks with radically different teaming processes. With more or less successful shared sensemaking, the team members collectively create (or fail to create) not only team task outputs but also the team itself.

This study examined burnout, stress and work importance among 120 Israelis working in binational teams, using quantitative (questionnaire) and qualitative (semi-structured interview) methodologies. Based on the existential perspective, the study documented low levels of burnout despite high levels of stress, which were explained by the high perceived
importance of the work. Hierarchical regression showed that importance moderated the effect of stress on burnout. Findings also revealed that the unexpected social stressors associated with cultural differences between team members were more stressful than the stressors associated with high-tech work.

Todays IT workers will have better chance in work environment if they have learned some soft skills beside technical skills. As there is growing demand of project work on global levels international teams have to have multi-skill competencies not just knowledge about technical skills for developing information systems. They have to manage different communication skills, speak foreign languages, have knowhow of customs and cultures, and be familiar working at different working hours as projects members are living in different time-zones, with knowing a lot of “Information Communication Technology (ICT)” tools to collaborate with teams. Through this paper was done academic and research paper literature review on topics in title to prove the statement or omitted it in conclusion for a class assignment of Information system project management.

In  the  current  information  society  come  many  challenges  to  organizations  in  the management  of  Information  Systems  and  Technology.  It  is  imperative  for  every  organization, the identification of  the challenges they  face  and the  leadership over them. These  challenges  will  guaranteed  to  change  our  behavior,  and  social  rules,  and  challenge the ethical standards where  the talent of  innovation and leadership play  a  key  role  in managing groups of workers scattered over different locations and geographies.  The  influence  that  the  leader  has  on  organizational  change  process  is  critical  in  the construction  of  new  spaces  in  organizations,  whether  physical  or  virtual  enabling  facilitate discussions on the  new challenges that are  posed to the teams. This  work  through  a  literature  review  will  have  as  study  analysis  the  virtual  teams  that are  increasingly  popular,  and this does not  necessarily  make  them more  effective  or successful in  their  performance  against  team  processes  such  as  communication,  trust,  Conflict, coordination or  leadership in geographic dispersion contexts of its members. Keywords:  Leadership,  Virtual  teams,  Technology,  Leadership  and  Team  Performance,  Trust, Conflict.