One Aspect of Management of a Virtual Organization

Article Summary #1
Name
Course
Instructor
Date
Kai-Tang et al (2014), sought to understand how the leaders’ feedback approach and motivating language (ML) influenced creative performance for virtual teams. The leaders in virtual organizations facilitate team cohesiveness and ensure effectiveness, but leaders face more challenges while working with virtual teams since they communicate and collaborate with the virtual team members simultaneously. The authors pointed out that under the demand feedback approach the team members were more creative when there are direction- giving instructions influenced the strategies of instructions used.
The researchers also stated that virtual teams may have distorted meanings, which may cause misunderstandings despite relying on telecommunication technologies to coordinate activities. The leaders strengthen team identification where the team members then forge a common identity and interact through virtual means to achieve common goals (Sivunen, 2006). The authors use the concept of motivation language including giving directions and empathetic language to hypothesize that this would have a positive impact on creative performance. However, motivational learning is a subjective concept, which may not be applicable in virtual organizations since performance cannot be directly linked with the learning process. There is more independence of thought in virtual organizations with the leadership coordinating activities in a decentralized network of staff members.
Leadership feedback has a positive influence on the team members’ ability to innovate since they see that their efforts are valued and there is clarity. Receiving feedback consistently is one approach to have a more positive influence on creative performance. The researchers acted as the virtual team leaders during the training session of the experimental study, and it is not clear whether their preconceived notions affected their perceptions of how the feedback system affected idea generation and creative performance. References