Tips for Developing a Climate of a Successful Virtual Team

Provide tips that help with developing the climate of a successful virtual team.
Interdependence
Fostering a sense of interdependence is critical to team functioning. Each member must feel that he or she is accountable to all other team members and that the other team members can rely on him or her. There are three factors that must be managed during this process.
Connection
Team members must feel a sense of connection on two levels. The first is task connection. This involves a commitment on the part of each member to the goals of the team. The second is interpersonal connection, which leads to information sharing, loyalty, and trust.
Barriers to Connection
Perhaps the greatest challenge in building connection is establishing clear and open communication. This can be especially difficult in virtual teams because the lack of face-to-face contact limits many avenues of communication. Typically, interactions in virtual teams lack nonverbal communication and involve less rich channels. In addition, the isolation and anonymity of members can lead to less inhibited and more assertive interactions than might be expected in a co-located team. Finally, cultural differences/diversity can further inhibit clear information exchange.
Purpose and Goal Clarity
Purpose and goal clarity are the essential ingredients in building both task and interpersonal connection. Shared vision is more important than detailed implementation plans, and trust must be built early. Trust is the "social glue" that holds teams together and may develop more slowly in virtual teams than in co-located ones.
Management and Team Competencies/Conditions
A supportive team climate does not emerge naturally. It requires that management and team members commit to certain conditions and develop specific competencies that will encourage and support connection and interdependence. These include:
Creative Tension
In order for teams to take advantage of differing perspectives, opinions, and approaches, the team climate should be characterized by what is called "creative tension." This involves an environment where differing points of view are accepted and members feel comfortable and safe in contributing their ideas. Input from all members is encouraged and honesty is a norm that is supported—even when that honesty means that others' views are questioned. On the other hand, unwarranted criticism is not a characteristic of creative tension.
Challenge
Supportive climates for teamwork are those that present the task in a challenging manner. This may involve an urgent deadline, a perplexing problem to solve, or just a change from the routine way of approaching the task.
Collaboration
This involves the ability to pull together and work collaboratively on a difficult task. It involves a certain "surrendering" of the ego in order to set aside one's own personal interests in favor of those of the group. It is a competency that is essential to interdependence and effective team functioning.
Freedom
Management must be willing to grant the team freedom from micromanagement, excessive surveillance, or other forms of intrusive evaluation. Freedom also involves the autonomy to determine how work is scheduled and accomplished.
Supportiveness
Management and team members can greatly increase team effectiveness by encouraging and empowering the group to take initiative. It should resist the temptation to rely on the status quo, but instead urge the team to discover new methods and solutions.
Resources
The willingness of individual team members and the organization to commit sufficient resources is essential. Resources can include time, effort, information, technology, funds, and manpower.
Selecting the Appropriate Collaboration Tools
One of the fastest growing fields in information technology is the development of collaboration tools. This is a good thing for teams of all sorts but is especially critical to virtual teams whose very existence depends on these tools.
Virtual teams may use a number of collaboration tools such as:
Conference Calls
Video Conferences
E-mail
Application Sharing Tools
Faxes
Other tools
In considering how to build supportive team climates, the choice of the correct collaboration tools can make or break a team’s effectiveness. We will be reviewing the types of resources that are available and examining the factors that managers and teams must consider in order to choose and implement the most appropriate tools for the task.
Communication Challenges in Virtual Teams
Dispersion is the most obvious challenge virtual teams face. Since they are not co-located, team members must overcome obstacles raised by differing time zones, differing levels of technical availability and proficiency, and differing cultures.
The very speed of communication that technology makes possible creates difficulties that also must be managed. With greater use of rapid communication technologies, there may be less time to carefully encode and process information. Information overload is possible when it is easy to replicate and distribute large amounts of data. Finally, when the technology is asynchronous (see below), there can be delays in feedback.
Many of the methods of communication used by virtual teams lack in "richness." Media Richness Theory is a framework that categorizes communications methods according to the amount of information if is capable of conveying. For example, a phone call correctly conveys the sender’s words, but cannot transmit non-verbal messages such as gestures or facial expressions. This makes it inferior to video conferencing, which is able to communicate body language, at least to some extent. Importantly, Media Richness Theory makes us realize that the more unstructured and uncertain a task is, the more we need a rich type of media that is capable of handling ambiguous messages. This is a particularly important consideration virtual teams. In working with virtual teams, we must be continually aware of how our messages are understood or interpreted. Often, we think we are being clear about our comments or instructions, when the receiver of the message is confused or even insulted. Read the following short article about Media Richness Theory:
Cordialism. (2011) Media Richness Theory. Retrieved from https://cordialism(dot)wordpress(dot)com/2011/11/25/media-richness-theory/
Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Modes of Communication
One of the main decisions that teams need to make in choosing the appropriate resources for collaboration is whether to use synchronous or asynchronous tools. This deals with the issues of time and place. Teams can be either co-located or dispersed (place), and even if co-located, members may not all be available at the same time.
Dooley, G. (2021). Building a high-performance team right now. Governance Directions, 73(9), 380–382. Available in the Trident Online Library.
Dyer, G., & Dyer, J. (2020). Chapter 2: Context—the foundation of team effectiveness. In Beyond team building: How to build high-performing teams and the culture to support them. John Wiley & Sons. Available in the Trident Online Library.
Widdowson, L., & Barbour, P. J. (2021). Chapter 5: Team identity. Why is team identity so important? In Building top-performing teams: A practical guide to team coaching to improve collaboration and drive. Kogan Page. Available in the Trident Online Library.