Business Report For Enhancing Virtual Team Communications

Communication Context

Discuss about the Business Report for Enhancing Virtual Team Communications.

The prime component of achievement for any organization is “communication”. The expanded trust, shared skills, and eventually enhanced execution are the important effects related with robust communication.  The unrestrained rapport in the midst of the teams inside the organization is associated with the enterprise management, since the propagation of crucial information and soaring recital skills are aided by these affiliation.

Virtual teams are an essential organizational source in the contradictory worldwide business. The employment of the virtual teams can lead to reduction of task accomplishment time, adaptation, and journey costs.

This report illustrates the interpersonal and cultural disparities between the virtual teams ranging from sales, marketing, to system admin incorporated in Chocolate Mortality Company. Moreover, recommendations are proffered for improving the organization’s communication so as to improve the productivity.

The lion’s share of specialized communicators in Chocolate Mortality organization works in a virtual group eventually in their own team, because of the expanded utilization of virtual groups. For speaking with teams from different societies and crosswise over time zones, the specialized communicators must possess linguistic expertise. The imperative factor in virtual groups is the intercultural correspondence that should be clear and exact to be caught on (Bhappu, Grif?th and Northcraft, 1997).

All the more particularly, a specialized learning of the collaborative tools is not only enough for working in virtual groups but also the capacity to convey viably over different societies.

For making eye to eye communications, the afore-mentioned capacities are crucial and should be exchanged to perform virtual work too. The ways to cooperate in virtual groups are figured out by the people from numerous disciplines. The terms of “correspondence, administration, brain research, and different controls” are essential for the joint effort in worldwide virtual groups. For instance, Johnston and Rosin were a part of a virtual Network Admin and Database Admin team respectively made out of “frameworks support and database managers” with individuals in three separate nations. This is only one case of a multidisciplinary virtual group, yet numerous working environment groups are made out of individuals from various disciplines. Also, virtual groups finish various assignments including administration, purchasing, distribution, tech support, sales, recommendations, etc.

Fig1: Communication Context of Virtual Teams

Opportunities	Burden
·         The acquaintance resources of heterogeneous types are presented ·         The competitive advantage can be achieved ·         Different technical expertise and experience of the team are exposed ·         Diversified market expertise	·         Difficulties in understanding the languages ·         Incompatibility in culture across various regions ·         Only small number of face-to-face communication ·         Difficult to acknowledge the team work

Table 1: Opportunities and Burdens in Virtual Team

In all the virtual teams of the organization, conflicts are unavoidable. After the consideration of virtual group intricate elements, the assessment turns into a major test. The inconsistency between the teams can be either positive or ruinous. A positive clash will be prompted at the point when the individuals from the group introduce diverse perspectives regarding an assignment and the team leadership (Baron, 1991).

Opportunities and Burden of Virtual Teams

Behind the confrontation of contrast in assessments, the damaging clash arises when the bunch of virtual team members questions each other expectations. An irony situation will be encountered if one group of virtual group associates mainly focuses on work alone and not any personal issues and the conflicts associated with the work will be transformed into relationship issues. Thereby, the cooperative inputs are affected and the organizational productivity will be decreased.

The main communication challenges are described below:

The technology interceded platform is used by the virtual teams to attend face to face conferences partially. Most of the effective communications are made by gestures like waving the hands, face manifestations, voice, periods, breaks, etc. So, the deficiency in non-verbal communication transforms the team interaction as a complicated process (Boutellier, Gassmann, Macho, and Roux, 1998).

The real environment expressions should be translated into the virtual terms by the virtual teams. For example, the expressions can be denoted by using emoticons in virtual environment.

The deficiency in non-verbal interaction results in the misinterpretations, annoyance, and production of discords between the team members.

The conventional form of the team member’s interrogators will be taken by the team members if they are not provided adequate periods for building their own virtual team.

The interrogator impact implementation produces disturbing impacts for constructing the confidence on other team members. The loss of conviction finally results in the ambiguity.

The virtual groups in “Chocolate Mortality” company comprise of employees belonging to various regions and cultures and are normally biologically distributed. The interpersonal issues and inadequate confidence level are experienced by the absence of similarity in intercultural aspects.

Due to the globalizations increase in organizations and the introduction of new network technologies and collaboration tools, the multi-cultural virtual teams are eminent these days (Carlson and Zmud, 1999). The responsive time delay, group members of diverse culture, synergy loss midst the group members, and communication failures results in the loss of productivity in organizations.

Following are the recommendations to “Chocolate Mortality” company to improve the communications within the virtual teams for increasing their productivity.

Uncertainty is the main drawback of the communication failure within the virtual teams. If the team members are not aware of the liability, interrogators, perception level of their accomplishments, and sharing of the workloads between them, they are subjected to ambiguity. So you should institute the obvious team and mutual standards.  74% of the team members had training on the team constitution and mutual standards(Baron, 1991).

Ethical Communication Implications

Therefore with obvious team constitution and mutual standards adoption, the team members can adapt themselves with their own flaws and potency.

During the initiation stage of virtual groups, the face to face conferences will assist the teams to acquire the liability, elucidate the project description, and to know about the tasks.  Frequent face to face meetings enhances the efficient communication. For once a year, 41% of the team members will not meet personally, 28% of team members meet once in a year, and 30% of team members meet twice in a year(Powell, Piccoli and Ives, 2004). So, the team members are encouraged to defend against the persuasion of attending face to face meetings regularly.

Since the non-vocal messages are filtered out by the technical tools, the leader of the virtual team must cheer up the team associates to participate in the communal interaction through chatting, discussing, and sharing their opinions on the tasks. And the feelings can be interpersonal too. The lack of social interactions influence the productivity in the subsequent areas: 48% for administering the challenges, 28% acquisition of member’s communication, and 40% of building confidence (Burk and Chidambaram, 1995). In a fully virtual environment, the chat sessions can be organized by the virtual team leader for lightening the dispositions, thereby improving the productivity.

The uncertainties of non-vocal interaction can be resolved by the development of communication rules and dialects. For example, the misinterpretation between silence and retorting can be avoided.

The general dialect comprising the general glossary, modalities, and interaction modes can assist in reducing the work annoyance and delusions. 18% of the team members are aware of the productivity loss due to the misinterpretation in communications (Kaywoth and Leidner, 2002).

Thus more number of brainstorming sessions should be conducted by the virtual team leader for constructing the general dialect without aiming for immediate outcomes.

The team coordination and efficient interaction impact the cultural disparities in virtual teams. The team associates employed from various regions in the same country is fair enough to build up the cultural disparity in a virtual environment. The associates possessing work experience in multiple cultural environments can explain their acceptability of cultural disparities to other team members for building the relationships and confidence.

Almost one quarter (24%) of the virtual associates is not successful in taking advantage of the cultural disparities (Crampton, 2001).  Moreover, in the recent years, 95% of the virtual team leaders are rated as successful or highly effectual to manage the multicultural and multiregional virtual teams.

According to a research on cultural disparities in virtual teams, the acquired resemblance amongst the team associates can be alleviated by the use of technical collaboration tools. Various body dialects and expressions play a major role in video conferencing but not with the written interaction.

Conclusion:

Level of retorting is the crucial aspect for building the relationships and confidence between the virtual team associates. From this perspective, the retort is about to take the jeopardy for explaining the other person’s view in an interaction to avoid the misinterpretation of that team member’s message and to make other members to interpret that message.

Hence, the associates in virtual team must consign to providing reply or reaction and criticism. The intrinsic communication regulations are set by the team associates to make ensure that there is no contribution without any reply or criticism. Moreover, the virtual team leader must be apparent that “the excellence and inevitable communication are more crucial for the effective operation of the virtual team and thereby the organizational productivity”.

Reference:

Crampton, C. (2001). The Mutual Knowledge Problem and it Consequences for Dispersed Collaboration. Organization Science, 12(3), pp. 250-340.

Kaywoth, T.R. and Leidner, D.E. (2002). Leadership Effectiveness in Global Virtual Teams. Journal of Management Information Systems, 18(3), pp.140-178..

Powell, A., Piccoli, G. and Ives, B. (2004). Virtual Teams: A Review of Current Literature and Directions for Future Research. The Data Base for Advances in Information Systems, 35(1), pp.30-50.

Burke, K. and Chidambaram,  L.  (1995). Developmental difference between distributed  and face-to-face  groups  in  electronically supported meeting environments: An exploratory investigation.  Group Decision and Negotiation, 4(3), pp. 213-233.

Baron, R. A. (1991). Positive Effects of Con?ict: A Cognitive Perspective.  Employees Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 4(3), pp. 25–36.

Bhappu, A., Grif?th, T. L. and Northcraft, G. B. (1997). Media Effects and Communication Bias in Diverse Groups.  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 70(3), pp.141-156.

Boutellier, R., Gassmann, O., Macho, H. and Roux, M. (1998). Management of Dispersed Product Development Teams: The Role of Information Technologies. R&D Management, 28(1), pp. 200-346.

Carlson, J. R. and Zmud, R. W. (1999). Channel Expansion Theory and the Experiential Nature of Media Richness Perceptions. Academy of Management Journal, 42(2), pp. 153–170.