Group items tagged

Framework for collaboration in distributed teams

How to structure a virtual team and the role of social interaction in distributed work contexts

Easy(?) way to deal with distributed work issues.

Tools that provide the water cooler function in a distributed team

It is a 100 page PDF describing scenarios for the future of work: Scenario 1: Global product creation in a networked company Scenario 2: E-professionals in ad-hoc self-organising teams Scenario 3: Coordinating distributed work of individual worker Scenario 4: Community-based collaborative workspace Scenario 5: Mobile workplaces in a collaborative business network Scenario 6: Mobile competence workers in global supply chain

Global virtual teams are internationally distributed groups of people with an organizational mandate to make or implement decisions with international components and implications. They are typically assigned tasks that are strategically important and highly complex. They rarely meet in person, conducting almost all of their interaction and decision making using communications technology. Although they play an increasingly important role in multinational organizations, little systematic is known about their dynamics or effectiveness. This study built a grounded theory of global virtual team processes and performance over time. We built a template based on Adaptive Structuration Theory (DeSanctis and Poole 1994) to guide our research, and we conducted a case study, observing three global virtual teams over a period of 21 months. Data were gathered using multiple methods, and qualitative methods were used to analyze them and generate a theory of global virtual team dynamics and effectiveness. First, we propose that effective global virtual team interaction comprises a series of communication incidents, each configured by aspects of the team's structural and process elements. Effective outcomes were associated with a fit among an interaction incident's form, decision process, and complexity. Second, effective global virtual teams sequence these incidents to generate a deep rhythm of regular face-to-face incidents interspersed with less intensive, shorter incidents using various media. These two insights are discussed with respect to other literature and are elaborated upon in several propositions. Implications for research and practice are also outlined.

Message: virtual is not as good as face-to-face. Virtual work is a necessity, but what si left out are the potentials

What is better: more or less freedom to work where and when people want

work is not defined by place but by how we connect with others

Tips to deal with communications problems in virtual work settings. the author emphasizes that they stem from lacking context when mostly communicating with email and phone - another way (than those mentioned) to overcoming them is to use more sophisticated tools and communicating at multiple channels

"But there are tools now: wikis, blogs, microblogging, ideation tools, jams, next-generation project management, what I call collaborative decision management. These are social tools for decision making. These are the new operating systems for the 21st-century enterprise in the sense that these are the platforms upon which talent-you can think of talent as the app-works, and performs, and creates capability."