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Going Virtual
Wrong, says Kenan-Flagler professor Arvind Malhotra. In an award-winning study, Malhotra shows that a cross-disciplined and disparate group of people, who had no common history of designing rocket engines, did so better, faster and less expensively than anyone has ever before. The virtual teaming research of two Kenan-Flagler professors - one in management, the other in information technology - is all the more timely given economic constraints and corporate travel restrictions after Sept. 11. They predict this will accelerate the use of virtual teams in the coming years. It's not rocket science Malhotra, an assistant professor of information technology and e-commerce, researches the idea of "extreme" virtual teams - teams who have never met and are multinational, multicultural and multidisciplinary. Eye-opening was "Radical Innovation without Collocation: A Case Study at Boeing-Rocketdyne," a paper that garnered a recent Society for Information Management (SIM) Best Paper award and a $65,000 grant from SIM. The case involved a team designing an engine for Boeing-Rocketdyne, based in Canoga Park, Calif. The team designed a prototype with six parts instead of the typical 450; with greater predicted quality; and with development costs of just $47,000, compared to typical costs of $4.5 million. Better yet, design took 10 months compared to six years. In short, the project was a runaway success. "The most surprising thing was that such a complex team could work in a complete virtual environment," Malhotra says of the project which took place several years ago. "Now, a lot of people are trying it, but at that point, it was unheard of or unimaginable that people could work without much face-to-face contact in a purely virtual environment and work on something that was fairly knowledge-intensive." Companies shouldn't use virtual teams just to save costs. Malhotra says you also gain new knowledge and more innovative ways of thinking. Virtual teams allow vital employees to do both important, day-to-day work and be creative because they're not away from their work sites. They can devote a percentage of the day to developing new knowledge without wrestling with the logistics of bringing the team together. Sophisticated advances in technology are paving the way for virtual teams, with everything from e-mail to conference calls, videoconferencing to electronic whiteboards and central data-sharing spaces. Now Malhotra has embarked on a two-year project studying teams at 35 companies. What are other companies saying about virtual teams? "They are skeptical that they can do it, but their fancy is tickled because they know they need to know how to do it," Malhotra says. "Why do I get up in the morning and get excited about this? Because this is the way we are going to work in the future, and there are a lot of questions that need to be answered." Challenges of virtual teams Virtual teams face many more challenges than do traditional teams, says Kenan-Flagler management professor Ben Rosen, who researches human behavior and human-resource management issues. "Virtual teams can be a tremendous tool for organizations, but they don't work effectively automatically," Rosen says. "You have to really put some thought into how working virtually is different from working face-to-face and prepare people for the virtual team experience." In a recent study, Rosen joined academics across the country to examine challenges at Sabre Inc. of Southlake, Texas, which makes software for the travel industry. The research involved 65 virtual teams scattered across the United States and Canada. The paper is slated for publication in Academy of Management Executive. In "Five Challenges to Virtual Team Success: Lessons From Sabre Inc.," the group outlines the issues:
Rosen explains that online you need to build trust through dependability and consistency, because there aren't opportunities to do so with face-to-face interaction. Rosen, Kenan-Flagler management professor Dick Blackburn and PhD student Stacie Furst also wrote a chapter in the forthcoming book, "Virtual teams that work: Creating the conditions for virtual team effectiveness." "Trust in virtual teams is a function of how quickly other people respond to your request," he says. "It's more of a behavioral rather than emotional bond. It's, 'When I send you an e-mail, do you respond within 24 hours?' It's based more on the other person's performance." Virtual teams can be difficult to manage, but leaders can review the archive of interactions and have teammates rate each other. Sabre invested heavily in online teaching, which covered sharing leadership, creating an agenda, reaching decisions and resolving conflicts. And thanks to technology, working alone doesn't mean working in isolation. "Many people say if you have team members who don't have chats over the water cooler or in the coffee lounge, you lose some synergy or spark of creativity; but with the right technology, you can capture that in a virtual team," Rosen says. Language and cultural differences can be problematic. At one company, team members grew frustrated when a colleague in Israel didn't respond to Saturday e-mail, failing to realize that day marks the Sabbath. In some Asian countries, it's unacceptable to confront. "In Japan, a common response when you disagree with someone is to say 'maybe,'" Rosen says. "Some people in North America became impatient with these 'maybes.'" Without firsthand visual clues, virtual team leaders can rate performance in part by how often someone offers online suggestions or searches for supporting documents for another team member. "Behavioral scientists have been studying teamwork for 50 or 60 years, and we know what makes for effective teams," Rosen says. "But there are additional challenges to working virtually, and that's where we think we're making a contribution." Contact Malhotra at (919) 962-3157, , and Rosen at (919) 962-3166, . |
t doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that a team of people working on a complex project, who've never worked together before and are geographically dispersed around the world, is doomed to fail. Right?