Psychology of consulting and coaching
Add 300 words to the current paper (1,900 words currently exist).
Write a paper of 2,000-2,500 words in which you discuss virtual teams. Address the following:
- Similarities and differences between face-to-face teams and virtual teams
- Development stages of teams
- Factors in virtual teams that result in success and inhibit success
- Best practices for leading a virtual team
- Ethical challenges of virtual teams
Psychology of Consulting and Coaching
Presently, the team concept continues to go beyond the traditional confines of time, distance, and cultures. Due to the immense progress realized regarding how firms operate and managed, newer opportunities have emerged, which has offered organizations a unique chance to form teams. Organizations are now nurturing team-based concepts to enhance their ability to solve problems, plan, develop products, make informed decisions, plan, and even negotiate business ideas. This development has led to the creation of virtual and face-to-face teams to assist organizations in their corporate processes, including performances, facilitating cost efficiency, promoting better enterprise connections, and enhancing organizational tasks’ overall accomplishment. This paper seeks to explore the organizational teams, including virtual and face-to-face teams, their comparisons, virtual teams’ best practices, ethical challenges, and the overall development of virtual teams.
Differences between Face-to-Face and Virtual Teams
Face-to-face teams, as compared to virtual teams, only operate under close contact and thrive under physical interactions. Conversely, as Gera et al. (2013) maintains, virtual teams are physically detached and depend on multiple technologies, including electronic mails, videoconferencing, and telephones, among other techniques to communicate and share information. Virtual teams are similarly complex compared to face-to-face teams since they transcend geographic location and time with no physical interaction. However, virtual teams suffer from the absence of emotions, weak or slow feedback, and appear as exceedingly structured, making their coordination challenging compared to face-to-face teams. The utilization of verbal feedback, real-time feedback, and turn-taking makes face-to-face more highly interactive, which enhances organizational cooperation (Khalil, 2017). Virtual teams are characterized by increased complexity due to constrained communication, diversity, and cultural biases that may lead to miscommunications. Different cultural frameworks strain information sharing, thereby posing a significant obstacle in the efficiency of virtual teams.
Performance
Virtual teams have superior performance as compared to face-to-face groups. A virtual team also helps shape transformational leaders’ behaviors since the leader gains immensely in technology engagement, setting track goals, and staying proactive when engaging the dispersed team. Besides, due to the utilization or a rich-media environment, a virtual team achieves a more exceptional task performance than face-to-face groups whose background possesses fewer media.
Cohesion
Face-to-face teams maintain stronger relationships as compared to virtual teams. According to Gera et al. (2013), a face-to-face team achieves a higher level of cohesion and greater satisfaction with team decisions and outcomes. In virtual teams, cohesion is not as strong, perhaps since the physical connection and relationship is lacking.
Conflict
A virtual team tends to experience more conflicts than face-to-face teams. The underlying reason for more conflicts in these teams is due to team diversity and varying conflict management habits. The higher level conflicts witnessed in virtual teams may be due to overreliance on technology to resolve such disputes, which at times clash since different persons have their conflict resolution behaviors.
Trust
Trust tends to thrive in face-to-face teams. Gera et al. (2013) argue a robust positive relationship between team trust and face-to-face teams’ performance. A face-to-face team plays a substantial role in fostering collaborative behaviors and trust as compared to the virtual teams.
Creativity
A virtual Team is more creative than a face-to-face team. According to Purvanova (2014), a virtual team offers additional opportunities for an organization to physically connect more resources, thereby permitting further flow and implementing ideas. When organizations seek better ways to enhance their innovative capacities and meet rising customer demands, virtual teams are instrumental in steering organizations towards innovativeness compared to face-to-face teams.
Development Stages of Teams
Team development is the act of learning to work together successfully. According to studies, teams undergo distinct sequential stages during team development. It is unusual for teams to perform efficiently for the first moment they come together. Bruce Tuckman devised a five-stage team development process upon which teams must observe to become highly effective. These stages include forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning.
Forming
In the forming stage, team members meet for the first time and start the acquaintanceship process. During this stage, team members share multiple issues, including experiences, backgrounds, and projects, both in progress or expected (Egolf, 2013). Since the forming stage lays the foundation for team cohesion and growth, having a team leader is vital to steer the team in laying down team goals while offering a vivid bearing of the cruciality of working together towards a common goal.
Storming
This stage is the most critical stage of team development. Abudi (2010) points out that individual competition and conflicts, which characterizes this stage, may impede team performance. Team performance may dwindle as team members focus on wasteful tasks as they differ on team goals and disagree on other areas of team efforts. Jacobs, Masson, Harvill, and Schimmel (2011) advises teams to work through disputing ideas, accept individual differences, and cooperate in putting across team tasks to enable a team to navigate this critical stage.
Norming
During this stage, team members start demonstrating unity and focus on attaining a common goal. Team members begin respecting individual differences, enhances information exchange, and facilitate better task coordination (Egolf, 2013). The norming stage fosters more substantial team commitment, averts team crises, and promotes team spirit. However, cooperation usually is precarious, and in situations of a lapse of differences, the team may relapse into the storming phase, which is typically rife with conflicts and stagnation.
Performing
In the performing phase, the team is already well-established, highly organized, and much motivated. Here, members are significantly committed to the team’s mission, thereby leaving no room for conflicts (Egolf, 2013). Even though this stage witnesses conflicts, they are effectively dealt with as problem-solving and achieving team goals highly drives the team.
Adjourning
The adjourning stage marks the final phase of the team development stage. In this phase, the team has realized most of its objectives (Egolf, 2013). Corporate rearrangement can disband the unit, whereby a new team can replace it, and the entire team development process repeated. In case the organization is contented with the team’s work, the team can be reassigned to other areas to extend productivity to other areas performing dismally.
Factors Promoting the Success of Virtual Teams
According to Szewc (2014), the major factors promoting virtual teams’ success include trust, leadership, and communication. Szewc (2014) cites poor communication as a primary cause for social isolation and lowered trust levels among team members and between members and the team leader. A virtual team must observe healthy communication since it offers transparency and efficiency (Szewc, 2014). Due to an effective communication organization, a virtual team enhances their capacity to exchange knowledge, improve their decision-making process, and promotes organizational productivity. Healthy communication practices can help a virtual team navigate cultural diversity, resolve conflicts, and reinforce corporate projects’ management.
Trust helps a virtual team to address their problems and conflicts while working towards achieving team goals. According to Szewc (2014), enhancing trust in a virtual team promotes cooperation and fosters a productive environment that encourages better information flow. Since a virtual team environment does not have an authority framework to oversee tasks and guide the staff’s activities as seen in a traditional team, trust typically assumes overall control. Virtual teams need to trust each other to enable them to achieve team interests. This development makes trust to be an integral aspect of promoting the success of a virtual team.
A right leadership style is essential to promoting the success of a virtual team. An effective leadership style will avoid problems, including poor project visibility, technology challenges, weak team synergies, reduced social interaction, and lack of trust. Den Hartog and Belschak (2012) notes that transformational leadership offers the members of any given team the vision and help in inspiring them intellectually. Transformational leadership behavior helps attain high performing virtual teams while stimulating a sense of purpose and team responsibility.
Factors inhibiting the success of virtual teams are entirely contrary to those promoting their success. Among these factors include communication problems, poor leadership, lack of shared goals, and cultural barriers. A communication problem promotes social isolation, deteriorates trust levels, and hampers decision-making, leading to team failure (Stangor, Tarry, & Jhangiani, 2014). Similarly, poor leadership obscures team goals, creates weak team synergies, promotes trust issues, and promotes poor interactions. The members are equally unable to realize their sense of purpose due to a lack of shared goals, leading to a weak performing team. A cultural barrier causes perpetual conflicts among team members, which weakens the ability of a given virtual team. Lack of a robust cultural understanding will impede the functioning of a virtual team considering these teams can be highly culturally diverse.
Best Practices for Leading a Virtual Team
Applying technology to communicate with team members in real-time and offering team members training will increase the chances of a virtual team becoming successful. Providing training to team members will ensure they get the right to use the technology and the utilization of technology tools (Corporate Education Group, n.d.). Besides, using technology platforms such as video conferencing will help make communication among team members natural since they can interpret non-verbal cues and facial expressions during their interactions.
Running successful virtual team meetings spells better chances of leading a virtual team. The fundamental principle of a virtual team meeting should be to regularly build, promote, and enhance engagements from all team members. A virtual team leader may consider such techniques as frequent feedbacks, discouraging monologues, referring team members by their names, getting every member to participate, and keeping track of all the members who participated in particular topics.
Developing a team operating agreement can be instrumental in leading a virtual team. A team operating agreement should outline how team members should work together, address issues, turn to meetings, allocate work, and tackle missed deadlines and team meetings. This agreement should be reviewed and adjusted as the team deems fit to enhance how the virtual team engages the operating agreement. With this in mind, the operating agreement should be understandable, specific, realistic, and sharable by all the team members.
Ethical Challenges of Virtual Teams
One key ethical challenges facing virtual team is how to identify differences among virtual team members and how to use the identified gaps to extol diversity and enhance team productiveness. Since virtual teams are culturally diverse, there is a need to observe ethical communication practices to foster respect and tolerance across varying cultures (Cagiltay, Bichelmeyer, & Akilli, 2015). A component of ethics is honesty in communication with other team members while learning to uphold respect towards their beliefs, ideas, and values.
Another challenge attributable to virtual teams is observing ethical leadership. A virtual team leader must always observe ethical behaviors while at the same time, inspiring trust among team members (Gheni et al., 2015). The leaders should set an example of what ethical decision-making entails and inspire team members to pursue ethical practices. Upholding ethical leadership is not always an easy task. A leader needs to unite diverse cultures into a single agreeable unit bound by an ethical foundation. All the team members must feel included in the team affairs and their voices respected and appreciated in a blend of other opinions and ideas of other members.
In brief, the emergence of complex organizational tasks has necessitated the transition of corporate functions from an individual to a team-based approach. Organizations are now utilizing teams more than individuals owing to the diversification of organizations, strategic business practices, and the rapid development of communication apparatuses. Face-to-face and virtual teams depict popular organizational groups that have emerged to keep pace with the transitioning corporate environment.
References
Abudi, G. (2010, May 9). The Five Stages of Team Development: A Case Study. Retrieved from https://www.projectsmart.co.uk/the-five-stages-of-team-development-a-case-study.php
Cagiltay, K., Bichelmeyer, B., & Akilli, G. K. (2015). Working with multicultural virtual teams: critical factors for facilitation, satisfaction, and success. Smart Learning Environments, 2(1), 11.
Corporate Education Group. (n.d.). Top 6 best practices for managing virtual teams. https://www.corpedgroup.com/resources/pm/6BestPracticesMVT.asp
Den Hartog, D. N., & Belschak, F. D. (2012). When does transformational leadership enhance employee proactive behavior? The role of autonomy and role breadth self-efficacy. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97(1), 194.
Egolf, D. B. (2013). Forming storming norming performing: Successful communication in groups and teams. IUniverse.
Gera, S., Aneeshkumar, G., Fernandez, S., Gireeshkumar, G., Nze, I., & Eze, U. (2013). Virtual teams versus face-to-face teams: A review of literature. IOSR Journal of Business and Management, 11(2), 1-4.
Gheni, A. Y., Jusoh, Y. Y., Jabar, M. A., Ali, N. M., Abdullah, R. H., Abdullah, S., & Khalefa, M. S. (2015, August). The virtual teams: E-leaders challenges. In 2015 IEEE Conference on e-Learning, e-Management, and e-Services (IC3e) (pp. 38-42). IEEE.
Jacobs, E. E., Masson, R. L., Harvill, R. L., & Schimmel, C. J. (2011). Group Counseling: Strategies and Skills. Cengage Learning.
Khalil, S. (2017). Investigating the factors that influence virtual teams’ performance within the United Arab Emirates using IMOI model. International Journal of Business and Social Science, 8(1).
Purvanova, R. K. (2014). Face-to-face versus virtual teams: What have we really learned? The Psychologist-Manager Journal, 17(1), 2.
Stangor, C., Tarry, H., & Jhangiani, R. (2014). Group decision making. Principles of Social Psychology-1st International Edition.
Szewc, J. (2014). Selected success factors of virtual teams: literature review and suggestions for future research. International Journal of Management and Economics, 38(1), 67-83. https:// doi.10.2478/ijme-2014-0015