CHAPTER 17 LEADING TEAMS 511
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Leading
the virtual workspace can make progress explicit. Leaders also provide regular
feedback, and they reward both individual and team accomplishments through
such avenues as virtual award ceremonies and recognition at virtual meetings.
They are liberal with praise and congratulations, but criticism or reprimands are
handled individually rather than in the virtual presence of the team.
As the use of virtual teams grows, there is growing understanding of what makes
them successful. Some experts suggest that managers solicit volunteers as much as
possible for virtual teams, and interviews with virtual team members and leaders
support the idea that members who truly want to work as a virtual team are more
effective.
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At Nokia, a signi cant portion of its virtual teams are made up of people
who volunteered for the task.
In a study of 52 virtual teams in 15 leading multinational companies, London Business School
researchers found that Nokia’s teams were among the most effective, even though they were
made up of people working in several different countries, across time zones and cultures.
What makes Nokia’s teams so successful?
Nokia managers are careful to select people who have a collaborative mind-set, and they
form many teams with volunteers who are highly committed to the task or project. The com-
pany also tries to make sure some members of a team have worked together before, providing
a base for trusting relationships. Making the best use of technology is critical. In addition to
a virtual work space that team members can access 24 hours a day, Nokia provides an online
resource where virtual workers are encouraged to post photos and share personal information.
With the inability of members to get to know each another one of the biggest barriers to effec-
tive virtual teamwork, encouraging and supporting social networking has paid off for Nokia.
28
Global Teams
As the example of Nokia shows, virtual teams are also some-
times global teams. Global teams are cross-border work teams
made up of members of different nationalities whose activities
span multiple countries.
29
Some global teams are made up of
members who come from different countries or cultures and
meet face-to-face, but many are virtual global teams whose
members remain in separate locations around the world and
conduct their work electronically.
30
For example, global teams
of software developers at Tandem Services Corporation coor-
dinate their work electronically so that the team is productive
around the clock. Team members in London code a project
and transmit the code each evening to members in the United
States for testing. U.S. team members then forward the code
they’ve tested to Tokyo for debugging. The next morning, the
London team members pick up with the code debugged by
their Tokyo colleagues, and another cycle begins.
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Global teams present enormous challenges for team lead-
ers, who have to bridge gaps of time, distance, and culture.
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In some cases, members speak different languages, use differ-
ent technologies, and have different beliefs about authority,
communication, decision making, and time orientation. For
example, in some cultures, such as the United States, commu-
nication is explicit and direct, whereas in many other cultures meaning is embedded in
the way the message is presented. U.S.-based team members are also typically highly
focused on “clock time” and tend to follow rigid schedules, whereas many other cultures
have a more relaxed, cyclical concept of time. These different cultural attitudes can affect
work pacing, team communications, decision making, the perception of deadlines, and
other issues, and provide rich soil for misunderstandings. No wonder when the execu-
tive council of CIO magazine asked global chief information of cers to rank their great-
est challenges, managing virtual global teams ranked as the most pressing issue.
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Nokia
Innovative Way
© MARK LEONG/REDUX
To update Lotus Symphony, a
package of PC software applications, IBM assigned the project to
teams in Beijing, China; Austin, Texas; Raleigh, North Carolina;
and Boeblingen, Germany. Leading the project, the Beijing group—
shown here with Michael Karasick (center), who runs the Beijing
lab, and lead developer Yue Ma (right)—navigated the global team
through the programming challenges. To help bridge the distance
gap, IBM uses Beehive, a corporate social network similar to Face-
book, where employees create profi les, list their interests, and post
photos.
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