VIRTUAL TEAMS

The topic of our last class of intercultural management was the virtual teams and how them get formed and what they need to do to exist and develop their task during the time that the group exist.

First we have to clarify what a virtual team is, according to Academic Journal of Management perspectives, the authors say the virtual teams are those who ''members are geographically distributed, requiring them to work together through electronic means with minimal face-to-face interactions''

From my point of view this type of team is the most difficult one, because it is essential the communication and the non-verbal communication as well as the importance to be close to the other members and with this the final task is going to be easier to achieve.

On the other hand for some people is better this type of team because it increase the productivity at the time to develop the work of each role of each team member, also reduce costs in other operations.

The other topic that I liked a lot were the steps to have a successful virtual team development which according to Heiko are set goals and have a clearly understanding of them, create trust (as we saw in previous sesions, is the most important fact that a team work must has), According to Sirkka Jarvenpaa and Dorothy Leidner ''Only trust can prevent the geographical and organizational distances of global team members from becoming psychological distances'' but on the other hand they say ''trust allows people to take part in risky activities that they can not control or monitor and yet where they may be disappointed by the actions of others'' this means that trust is an essential part of the human being that can help or harm us if is used in a wrong way.

Other step is the information that the virtual teams should share (this is the most complicated part, because in virtual teams communication is always done through an electronic device with out the face-to-face item which make it harder) and the last step is the preparation and planning, not just of the topic and job that the team must do but also the preparation to be working not just with people with different costumes in some cases with different language and costumes but also with a very restricted communication.

 

This led me to the QUESTION???

Can people trust when they are working into virtual teams?

Giving my opinion I would say that yes, people can trust into virtual teams but not as much as with teams where people can gather together to explode all their abilities and where people can have a personal communication with all the items that this has such as non verbal communication and verbal communication.

According to Cummings and Bromiley ''maintaining that a person trust a gropu when that person believes that the group ''makes a good-faith effort to behave in accordance with any commitments both explicit or implicit; is honest in whatever negotiations preceded such commitments and; does not take excessive advantage of another even when the opportunity is available''

This means that can exist trust but with certain restrictions.

• Malhotra, A., Majchrzak, A., & Rosen, B. (2007). Leading Virtual Teams. Academy of Management Perspectives, Vol. 21(No. 1), Pp. 60-70. Retrieved May 15, 2015, from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.eafit.edu.co/stable/4166287?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchText=virtual&searchText=teams&searchUri=/action/doBasicSearch?Query=virtual+teams&acc=on&wc=on&fc=off&group=no  

• Cummings, L., & Bromiley, P. (1995). The Organizational Trust Inventory (OTI). In Trust in Organizations (p. 440). SAGE Publications.  
• Schmidt, H. (Director) (2015, May 12). Virtual Teams. Lecture PowerPoint. Lecture conducted from EAFIT University, Medellin.