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