Business
Virtual teams have become an important part of businesses today due to “an increase in corporate restructuring, competition, and globalization,” says Deborah Roebuck, Stephen J. Brock and Douglas Moodle in an article written in Business Communication Quarterly (Roebuck, Brock, Moodle, 2004, p. 359). A study done by C. Erik Timmerman & Craig R. Scott, written in Communication Monographs, found that as of 2000, “80% of Fortune 500 companies involved half of their employees in virtual teams” (Timmerman & Scott, 2006, p. 108).
Robin Goodfellow (2005) found that virtual communities are being used to communicate knowledge over a wide range of practitioners. The virtual communities make this very easy to do. You are able to communicate with people that are located throughout the world that are working in your same field with different types of expertise.
Roebuck et al. describes three challenges that are faced when you are participating in a virtual team:
1. You need to “compensate for the lack of face-to-face interaction.” This is because when you have a live group you are able to rely “voice levels, smiles, and raised eyebrows to determine whether they are being understood” (2004, p. 359). In a virtual team you do not have that luxury.
2. It is hard to build a relationship in a virtual team. To have a successful team you need to build trust and without face-to-face interaction it is hard to build trust (2004, p. 359).
3. You have to find a way to “access and leverage the unique knowledge of each member to achieve the team’s goal” (2004, p. 359).
These are just a few of the challenges that businesses have to overcome when they decide to go “virtual.” Virtual teams can be very beneficial to companies but the lack of face-to-face interaction can be detrimental to the communication of the team. Businesses need to find a happy medium between the two to make sure they are utilizing all of their resources efficiently.
References:
Goodfellow, R. (2005). Virtuality and the Shaping of Educational Communities. Education,
Communication & Information, 5, 113-129.
Roebuck, D. B. , Brock, S. J. & Moodie, D. R. (2004). Using a Simulation to Explore the
Challenges of Communicating in a Virtual Team. Business Communication Quarterly,
67, 359-367.
Timmerman, C. E., & Scott, C. R. (2006). Virtually Working: Communicative and Structural
Predictors of Media Use and Key Outcomes in Virtual Work Teams. Communication
Monographs, 73, 108-136.
2 comments:
In your Business section of virtual worlds, you mentioned a lot about compensation for the lack of face-to-face communication. Were you able to find any studies on solutions for this, for exampe, video-conferencing? Do you think that video-conferencing takes care of the lack of face-to-face communication in the business world?
Is it difficult to set up virtual conferencing? Is virtual conferences secure from eavesdroppers and how does this add to the difficutlies with setting up virtual conferencing?
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