Leading a Virtual Team Essay

Johnson had just completed her first month as manager for succesful union that provides a variety of web-based services and solutions. Last week, she was informed that she would be the impertinently leader of a ag crowd that included 10 individuals. To her surprise, non however were these squad members diverse in terms of their functional training and expertise, simply they also represented a variety of culture backgrounds and only triad were located in her placement building. She quickly learned that 7 of 10 individuals actually worked from their home countries that included Japan, China, Mexico, Australia, Germany, Colombia, and Egypt.Up until this point, this virtual team collaborated on projects by using a variety of communication tools, including instant email messaging, yell calls, videoconferencing, document sharing, and occasional confluxs at head quaters. After reviewing many of the past meeting notes and communication transcripts among the sort out members, Jo hnson realized that many of the team members had very different communication styles and levels of proficiency in English. The teams late assignment was an important one.The 10 members needed to develop and swan out a new product within the six weeks. This was in direct response to a new product just by a major competitor. To complicate matters, a six-week product development bike was unheard of until this point, the companys turnaround time for a new product offering was approximately three months. The company had no choice. If they did not counter the competitive threat immediately, then the company risked losing some detect customers and market share. Johnson researched the past performance of her newly inherited virtual team.Although the general quality of past decisions was quite high, the team seemed to take several months to suck up those decisions. This was a potential problem for Johnson. Time was no longer a luxury. She has to figure out a way to encourage the team t o cue fleet without comprising quality. Through a combination of analyzing past team meeting notes and transcripts and speaking one-on-one with team members, she started to accumulate some facts that might be useful in solving the decision-making speed issue.First, Johnson sight that the Japanese and Chinese team members did not participate much in the videoconferences or telephone conference call, but rather preferred written communication in the form of faxes and e-mail. In contrast, the Australian and Mexican team members seemed to thrive on telephone calls and face-to-face meetings. Second, there appeared to be some infighting among the three members of the group that were domiciled at headquaters. Most of the past arguments seemed to be most the groups goals and mission.Each had a very different idea in learning ability in terms of what the group needed to accomplish. The comments in written communication theory didnt get personal, but there were definitely heated debates about what objectives the group should be focusing on. The third potential obstacle to faster the decision making had to do with sporadic use of face-to-face meetings. To her surprise, Johnson discovered that such meetings rarely occured and that there was no attempt to bring the group together when it was first formed last year.Johnson expected that the team would keep met and perhaps engaged in some team building performance to build trust and rapport among team members. This was not the case. In addition, the team did not receive any form of decision making or group conflict resolution training. Johnson sat back in her office and thought about the problem at hand. She needed to develop and tack together a new product within six weeks. In coordinate to produce a high-quality product, each of the 10 virtual team members had to cave in their knowledge and effort in a cooperative and timely manner.