Options For leadership and Work Design
Maintaining and building a capable virtual team in a business organization has become the trickiest part, especially in balancing apartness and togetherness. However, the virtual team has developed various methods of best addressing apartness and togetherness organization balance. In essence, the workgroups are the most imperative building blocks of every business enterprise. In most of the traditional business corporations, the workgroups were most functional in engineering, sales, and manufacturing departments. Recently, business companies have, however, begun to develop a business style that is somewhat cross-functional explicitly. These business firms are mostly built upon some flatter structures of the organization. The modern business structures have adopted the team-based business structures leaving behind the traditional hierarchies and functional areas (Malhotra et al., 2007). Some of the groups in these modern organizations are responsible for specific corporate deliverables. The paper will explain the options for leadership and work design of the virtual teams and how the characteristics of the team and task requirements affect the choice of direction and work design. It will also assess the effectiveness of practices and structures for virtual teaming.
Options For leadership and Work Design
Most of the contemporary business firms face the obvious environmental problem and global competition. It, therefore, requires a creative and knowledgeable team for it to survive. Creativity is significant, especially to the virtual teams, since it joins business individuals and consumers around the world. The main goal for the virtual team is to meet consumer demands and minimize competition from all markets across the globe. In a real sense, many of these virtual teams are not different from the most imperative face to face teams. Most of the traditional processes and skills are essential for the virtual units and strictly similar to those that are amplified by the co-located business teams (Malhotra et al., 2007). However, the process and skills for the virtual teams are somewhat difficult to adopt since they require more effort and expertise to establish compared to face to face organizational teams. The following are the options for the work design and leadership of the virtual groups. Don't use plagiarised sources.Get your custom essay just from $11/page
Clarifying Process and Tasks
Ideally, business managers should align their business team on goals, roles, and responsibilities in the first three months. Coordination in the virtual team is, however, inherently challenging since, at that time, the business employees are not co-located. Therefore, it is imperative to put more attention on the processes and the details of the task design. The business firms and managers should assign a task to specific subgroups involving three to four members.
Moreover, it should make sure that the work process is more evident with the various specification of genuine business employees. It should note the specific employee responsible for a particular task and the exact time when the employee performs the duty. The management should periodically perform after-action reviews to assess and evaluate how business duties are performing. (Malhotra et al., 2007). The action enables the identification of training needs and process adjustments.
Commitment to communication charter
Virtue team communication is often less productive and frequent compared to face to face business interaction. In face to face communication, there is more contextual information and cues about various states of emotions. In this case, the only system of avoiding specific pitfalls may involve discipline or be extremely clear about the communication structures of the team. Developing a charter would help in establishing behavior norms, especially when participating in various meetings, for example, listening attentively, talking clearly, and limiting side conversation (Malhotra et al., 2007). The management should develop a charter that involves guidelines with communication modes when replying to an email and sharing a business document.
Leveraging communication technologies
Various technological advances can be adopted by business firms to improve leadership and work design for virtue teams. Collaborative technologies may vary from video conferencing, multi-point, to shared workspaces. The technological systems may unquestionably make the management of the virtual team more accommodative and easier. Conversely, involving the best technical application, may not necessarily mean the most featured or the newest apps (Theis & Wong, 2017). It is critical for business managers not to sacrifice business reliability. When the virtual team is struggling to get connections from the technological systems, they may end up wasting a lot of business time undermining the whole organizational endeavor (Maynard et al., 2019). Furthermore, the management may sacrifice some of the system features to include every team member in one system. If a business organization does not do that, then it risks creating some members in the second class, thereby undermining business effectiveness.
Team Characteristics and Task Requirement
Today, business organizations have adopted the new business norm of working from the comfort of their home by the use of technological systems. Rise of the traveling costs and unlimited search for talents geographically has led to the adoption of virtue teamwork by most of the business companies when carrying out their business operations (Malhotra et al., 2007). In traditional setups, most of the people prefer working from remote areas, but the number has adversely reduced to almost 20 percent (Lloyd, 2017). However, even with the advancement of technology and new management systems, there still a team of virtual teams that do not offer positive business outcomes. Individual or organizational characteristics define the performing and nonperforming virtue teams. The following are the characteristics of virtual teamwork.
Collaboration
A successful business team most develop various strategies on how to collaborate significantly across space and time. The availability of available processes and systems to support and structure encourages team coordination. With the possible structures, these business teams leverage and work together, minimizing individual strengths of completing business tasks and realize profits at the end of the trading period. The use of software tools facilitates remote teamwork and virtual collaboration. Most business firms use project management systems and software in the management of workflow transparency, where every staff can see the roles and duties of every employee (Maynard et al., 2019). The technological software is also capable of providing support when needed by the workers. Besides, the use of the cloud-based business systems and platforms fosters business collaboration in that it allows multiple members of the team to attend the same business project when located a far distance from one another.
Trust
Trust is the foundation of effective virtual collaboration in all business organizations across the globe. It is significant when building trust with the team that is dispersed geographically. Generally, the effort may be earned due to the introduction of various initiatives over time. It is mostly applied by most business organizations where it defines commitment and personally knows every member of the team (Malhotra et al., 2007). In such a case, business employees can gain more confidence with one another. They can significantly rely on others to perform their duties and realize the business goals at the end of the trading period. According to research, an increased level of trust improves team performance in businesses that have adopted virtual teamwork systems.
Assessment of Effectiveness for the Virtue Team
A virtual team is a significant business team for efficient conduction and cost effectiveness of business roles across the globe. The virtue team shares a common cooperate goal where the members are geographically situated in different regions. In a real sense, the authors highlight on maintaining and building a capable virtual team (Maynard et al., 2019). They are knowledgeable and creative in that they address the balance between apartness and togetherness. They have outlined how the leadership and the virtual are handled.
Conclusion
The authors have brought forward a significant indication of the balance between togetherness and apartness is a virtue team business organization. The paper provides options for work design and leadership in virtual based business firms. Here, it has defined how business managers should manage their virtual teams by providing technological platforms and supports to enhance togetherness and collaboration in the business firm. The task requirement and features have been discussed as the most effective driver of virtual team business enterprises. In a nutshell, the paper assesses the effectiveness of the virtue team in the realization of the vision and goals of all business organizations across the globe.