table 1. Principles for effective virtual
teamwork (from nunamaker7).
Principles
1 Realign reward structures for
virtual teams
2 Find new ways to focus attention
on task
3 design activities that cause people
to get to know each other
4 Build a virtual presence
5 Agree on standards and terminology
6 Leverage anonymity when appropriate
7 Be more explicit
8 Train teams to self-facilitate
9 Embed collaboration technology
into everyday work
where the only concern is getting the
particular task completed. In the short
run, this may increase the costs of the
particular project, but in the long run
it may create the basis for efficient
performance of repeated tasks. Team
members from long-term orientation
cultures will likely be easy to persuade
to invest in team-building activities.
Those from a short-term orientation
culture may see these investments as a
waste of effort.
Dynamics will also vary with group
size and the number of cultures rep-
resented. One IT development project
familiar to the authors had more than
70 team members from 10 countries
on three continents. It was extremely
difficult to find approaches work-
able for the whole group. This task
was particularly challenging as part
of the team was co-located and oth-
ers were distant, the work was highly
interdependent, major software tools
were proprietary thus available only at
the headquarters site, and the Euro-
pean team leaders took a highly “self-
facilitate” approach that resulted in
much uncertainty, redundancy, and
ill feeling. Given that the project was
never completed and that bitterness
remains among some team members
to the present, it is not clear what so-
lution would have fully addressed this
situation. However, it is clear that not
directly addressing cultural issues was
not a successful strategy.
the Cross-Cultural manager
It stands to reason that managers of all
globally distributed IT teams need basic skills in all five of the Table 2 areas.
We believe the cross-cultural IT team
manager needs two additional skills.
The cross-cultural distributed IT
team manager must recognize that
table 2. Facets of global it team and project activities.
Facet
Task supervision
Communication supervision
Time and agenda supervision
Work process supervision
Environment variation
supervision
Description
intelligent division and assignment of tasks, monitoring task
completion for completeness and quality, integrating completed
tasks into larger team products
ensuring continued participation, full and complete exchange
of information, surfacing and resolution of conflict, conducting
synchronous and asynchronous interchanges
setting up intelligent time frames for tasks, reorganizing critical
paths for sequencing of activities, ensuring priority attention to
the project relative to other group member obligations
ensuring an understanding and buy-in for common goals,
negotiating common tools and work processes, maintenance
of common bodies of knowledge and version control from
which all members draw
ensuring that terms are used consistently even where their
reference difference varies in different locations (for example,
accounting terms that pertain to local taxation or reporting within
different countries or regions), ensuring smooth acceptance
of varied holidays and labor rules, working with time zones
and other physical geography issues
there are often many approaches to doing almost anything. Following the
systems concept of equifinality, there
are many ways to arrive at a destination. The culturally sensitive manager
must recognize the existence of these
multiple paths. They will accumulate
knowledge regarding how to evaluate
the different benefits, costs, and risks
of different approaches. And they will
recognize that an unfamiliar approach
may in fact be the best one for a particular circumstance.
Thus, there are circumstances
where introducing a “foreign” cultural approach may result in desired
outcomes. Mexican group facilitators
reported success when purposely introducing more formal processes into
meeting support systems in order to
shift the culture of meetings to greater
standardization, focus on outcomes,
and retention of discussed ideas.
6
In considering multiple paths,
however, the manager encounters
inevitable trade-offs between standardization and customization. Developing common standards while
avoiding significant loss of employee
productivity can be challenging. Decoupling issues can often provide a
solution to this trade-off. For example,
a co-located subgroup may discuss a
project in their home language but
create software modules conforming
to standard formats. The worldwide
project management director for a
huge global IT company described her
firm as setting a project management
standard and training all new managers to this standard. At the same time
successful “legacy” managers were
encouraged to move to the standard,
but were given much latitude for nonstandard but effective methods. In the
short run there continued to be quite
a bit of diversity in approaches, with
the expectation that a standard would
emerge over time.
The cross-cultural distributed I T team
manager must develop a broad set of approaches to the five teamwork facets and
become skilled at selectively applying
these. This means developing varied
approaches to monitoring employee
work, to setting benchmarks and to
measuring progress. An example of
this occurred among Irish IT workers
at a U.S. multinational who balked at
using time cards rather than simply