Leadership Competencies for Managing Global Virtual Teams - INTRODUCTION, BACKGROUND, GVT LEADERSHIP COMPETENCIES, FUTURE TRENDS, CONCLUSION

Diana J. Wong-MingJi
Eastern Michigan University, USA

INTRODUCTION

The demand for leadership competencies to leverage performance from global virtual teams (GVTs) is growing as organizations continue to search for talent, regardless of location. This means that the work of virtual leaders is embedded in the global shifting of work (Tyran, Tyran & Shepherd, 2003). The phenomenon began with the financial industry as trading took place 24/7 with stock exchanges in different time zones. It is expanding into other industries such as software programming, law, engineering, and call centers. GVTs support the globalization of work by providing organizations with innovative, flexible, and rapid access to human capital. Several forces of competition contribute to the increasing adoption of GVTs, including globalizing of competition, growing service industries, flattening of organizational hierarchies, increasing number of strategic alliances, outsourcing, and growing use of teams (Pawar & Sharifi, 1997; Townsend, DeMarie & Hendrickson, 1998). The backbone of GVTs is innovation with computer-mediated communication systems (CMCSs). Advances with CMCSs facilitate and support virtual team environments.

Leaders of GVTs have a pivotal role in mediating between the internal team processes and the external environment. Leadership competencies also are necessary to keep up with the evolving demands placed on GVTs. Previously, GVTs focused primarily on routine tasks such as data entry and word processing. More recently, the work of GVTs began to encompass non-routine tasks with higher levels of ambiguity and complexity. By tackling more strategic organizational tasks such as launching multinational product, managing strategic alliances, and negotiating mergers and acquisitions, GVTs contribute higher added value to a firm’s competitive advantage. As a result, leadership competencies for GVTs become more important in order to maximize the performance of GVTs.

Leadership competencies encompass knowledge, skills, abilities, and behaviors. The following discussion reviews the context, roles, and responsibilities of managing GVTs, identifies five broad categories of GVT leadership competencies, and outlines significant future trends.

BACKGROUND

In order to address specific leadership competencies for GVTs, it is important to understand the virtual workplace context. “Global virtual teams being a novel organizational design, it is very important to maximize the fit between team design and their stated intent” (Prasad & Akhilesh, 2002, p. 104). Currently, many organizations are deploying the use of GVTs much more rapidly than the collective understanding of their unique characteristics, dynamics, and processes. Anecdotal evidence exists about the difficulties and poor performance of GVTs. But the expectations of flexibility, accessing expertise regardless of geographical location, and speed of fulfilling organizational goals continue to drive the growth of GVTs (Gibson & Cohen, 2003).

GVTs have similarities and differences when compared with traditional teams (Maznevski & Chudoba, 2000). The similarities include being guided by shared goals, working on interdependent tasks, and sharing responsibilities for outcomes. The differences are the collocation and synchronous communication of traditional teams vs. geographical dispersion and often asynchronous communication for virtual teams. The stability of GVTs depends on the project and the team’s role in fulfilling the organizational purpose. Thus, GVT leaders may be working with a project orientation or indefinite perpetual organizational responsibilities, which shape the lifecycle of the team.

Effective GVT leaders must manage magnified ambiguities and complexities compared to traditional team leaders. Prasad and Akhilesh (2002) define a GVT as “a team with distributed expertise and that spans across boundaries of time, geography, nationality, and culture” (p. 103). They address a specific organizational goal with enhanced performance and operate with very little face-to-face interaction and predominantly computer mediated and electronic communication. As a result, leaders of GVTs need to address unique challenges that stem from spatial distances, asynchronous communication, multicultural dynamics, and national boundaries in a virtual environment.

Established research findings on teams indicates that leaders have a critical influence on team performance outcomes (Bell & Kozlowski, 2002; Fjermestad & Hiltz, 1998-1999; Kayworth & Leidner, 2001-2002). In general, team leaders have two critical functions: team development and performance management. Some general leadership tasks for managing teams include developer of team processes, facilitators of communications, and final arbiter for task completion (Duarte & Tennant-Snyder, 1999). Bell & Kozlowski (2002) offer a typology of virtual teams based on four characteristics—temporal distribution, boundary spanning, lifecycle, and member roles—that are mediated by task complexity. These characteristics imply that effective management of GVTs requires a portfolio of leadership competencies to address the following responsibilities: (1) provide clear direction, goals, structures, and norms to enable self regulation among team members; (2) anticipate problems; (3) monitor the environment and communicate changes to inform team members; (4) design back-up plans to buffer changes in environmental conditions; (5) develop feedback opportunities into team management structure for regular performance updates; (6) diagnose and develop appropriate team development through a virtual medium; (7) diagnose the translation of self-regulation methods across different boundaries; (8) modify behaviors and actions according to the particular situations to support the communication of worldviews among team members and build a third culture; and (9) identify and communicate team member roles to create role networks.

An important component of the GVT leader’s work environment is the virtual “rooms” for the team’s interactions. A wide range of products offers differing capabilities. For example, Groove Client 2.5 and Enterprise Management from Groove Networks, Workgroup Suite 3.1 from iCohere, and eRoom 7.0 from Documentum are products that facilitate how virtual teams can navigate through cyberspace (Perey & Berkley, 2003). Large firms in the auto industry use a commercial B2B product called ipTeam from NexPrise to support collaboration among geographically dispersed engineering team members. IBM offers the IBM Lotus Workplace Team Collaboration 2.0. Free Internet down-loads such as NetMeeting from Microsoft also are available to facilitate virtual meetings. Competitors include FarSite from DataBeam Corp, Atrium from VocalTec Communications Ltd., ProShare from Intel Corp, and Conference from Netscape. The list of available CMCS products continues to grow and improve with more features that attempt to simulate face-to-face advantages. As a result, part of managing GVTs includes evaluating, selecting, and applying the most appropriate CMCS innovations to support team interactions. Adopting CMCS needs to account for work locations, members involved, technological standardization, work pace, work processes, and nature of work in the organization. In sum, a GVT leadership portfolio must be able to manage CMCSs, diverse team members, team development, and work flow processes.

GVT LEADERSHIP COMPETENCIES

Competencies for GVT leaders can be classified into five broad categories: CMCS proficiency, work process design, cross-cultural competencies, inter-personal communication, and self-management. The five groups of competencies are interrelated. For example, a high degree of expertise with CMCSs without the necessary interpersonal communication competencies likely will lead to conflicts, absentees, and negative productivity.

First, GVT leaders need to have technical proficiency with innovations in CMCS in order to align the most appropriate technological capabilities with organizational needs. Technical knowledge of CMCSs and organizational experience enables GVT leaders to align technology with strategic organizational goals. Organizational experience provides GVT leaders with insights regarding the organizational work task requirements, strategic direction, and culture. This tacit knowledge is rarely codified and difficult to outsource compared to explicit knowledge. This implies that firms should provide training and professional development for leaders to increase CMCS proficiency.

Second, GVT leaders require work process design competencies to manage the workflows. Managing global virtual workflows depends on leadership skills to structure teams appropriately for subtasks, monitor work progress, establish expectations, maintain accountability, build a cohesive team, motivate team members, create trust, develop team identity, and manage conflicts (Montoya-Weiss, Massey & Song, 2001; Pauleen & Yoong, 2001; Piccoli & Ives, 2003). GVT leaders also need to devote considerable attention to performance management, especially in prototypical teams where there may be information delays and members are decoupled from events. GVT leaders can employ temporal coordination mechanisms to mitigate negative effects of avoidance and compromise in conflict management behavior on performance (Montoya-Weiss, Massey & Song, 2001). During the launching of teams, GVT leaders need to use appropriate team building techniques (e.g., discussion forums) to become acquainted and to establish positive relationships (Ahuja & Galvin, 2003; Prasad & Akhilesh, 2002). The lifecycle of virtual teams tends to proceed through four stages of group development that entails forming with unbridled optimism, storming with reality shock, norming with refocus and recommitment, and performing with a dash to the finish (Furst et al., 2004). The lifecycle of virtual teams influences the development of team spirit and identity, which is more important with continuous virtual team lifecycle. Its membership is relatively more stable compared to temporary projects. Task complexity places constraints on team structure and processes (Prasad & Akhilesh, 2002). Relatively simple tasks have less need for stable internal and external linkages, common procedures, and fixed membership, compared to more complex tasks. Leaders need to assert flexible, collegial authority over tasks and act as empathetic mentors to create collaborative connections between team members (Kayworth & Leidner, 2001). In sum, managing the work process design requires dealing with paradoxes and contradictions to integrate work design and team development.

Third, GVT leaders also require cross-cultural competencies, more specifically identified as global leadership competencies. “Successful virtual team facilitators must be able to manage the whole spectrum of communication strategies as well as human and social processes and perform these tasks across organizational and cultural boundaries via new [information and communication technologies]” (Pauleen & Yoong, 2001, p. 205). Developing global leadership competencies entail a sequence from ignorance, awareness, understanding, appreciation, and acceptance/internalization to transformation (Chin, Gu & Tubbs, 2001). The latter stages involve development of relational competence to become more open, respectful, and self-aware (Clark & Matze, 1999). Understanding cultural differences helps to bridge gaps in miscommunication. Identifying similarities provides a basis for establishing common grounds and interpersonal connections among team members. Leaders who are effective in leading across different cultures have relational competence to build common grounds and trust in relationships (Black & Gregersen, 1999; Gregersen, Morrison & Black, 1998; Manning, 2003). By increasing trust, leaders can connect emotionally with people from different backgrounds to create mutually enhancing relationships (Holton, 2001; Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999). The connections are critical to construct a high-performing team (Pauleen, 2003). A key to cross-cultural leadership competencies for GVTs is projecting them into a virtual environment. This is related to CMCS proficiency, which supports the communication cross-cultural competencies in a virtual environment. Cross-cultural competencies also are closely interrelated with both interpersonal communication competencies and self-management to effectively lead GVTs.

Fourth, interpersonal communication competencies do not necessarily encompass cross-cultural competencies. But cross-cultural competencies build upon interpersonal communication competencies. Strong interpersonal communication enables GVT leaders to span multiple boundaries to sustain team relationships (Pauleen, 2003). An important communication practice is balancing the temporal dimension and rhythm of work to stay connected (Maznevski & Chudoba, 2000; Saunders, Van Slyke & Vogel, 2004). Interpersonal communication competencies for GVT leaders need to focus on the human dimension. For example, GVT leaders need to be conscious of how they “speak,” listen, and behave non-verbally from their receiver’s perspective without the advantage of in-the-moment, face-to-face cues. This provides the basis for moving from low to higher levels of communication—cliché conversation, reporting of facts about others, sharing ideas and judgments, exchanging feelings and emotions, and peak communication with absolute openness and honesty (Verderber & Verderber, 2003). Interpersonal communication skills of GVT leaders should, at a minimum, support the exchange of ideas and judgments. When GVT leaders demonstrate “active listening” online, team members likely will move toward higher levels of communication. Active listening in GVTs can be demonstrated with paraphrasing, summarizing, thoughtful wording, avoiding judgment, asking probing questions, inviting informal reports of progress, and conveying positive respectful acknowledgements. Another aspect of interpersonal communication competencies for GVT leaders is establishing netiquette, which establishes ground rules and team culture. GVT leaders can strategically develop their interpersonal communication competencies to socialize team members, build team connections, motivate team commitment, resolve conflicts, and create a productive team culture to achieve high performance outcomes (Ahuja & Galvin, 2003; Kayworth & Leidner, 2001-2002).

Finally, a GVT leader’s self-management competencies fundamentally influence the development of the four competencies. GVT leaders need to manage their self-assessment and development to acquire a portfolio of competencies. A high level of emotional intelligence enables GVT leaders to engage in self-directed learning for personal and professional development. Self-management refers to adaptability in dealing with changes, emotional self-control, initiative for action, achievement orientation, trustworthiness, and integrity with consistency among values, emotions and behavior, optimistic view, and social competence (Boyatzis & Van Oosten, 2003). The development of GVT leaders with self-management can positively influence team performance by rectifying areas of their own weaknesses and reinforcing their strengths.

In summary, GVTs provide organizations with an important forum for accomplishing work and gaining a competitive advantage in global business. Technological innovations in CMCSs provide increasingly effective virtual environments for team interactions. A critical issue focuses on the GVT leader with the necessary portfolio of competencies. Research and understanding of leadership competencies for managing GVTs are at a nascent stage of development.

FUTURE TRENDS

Researchers need to delve into this organizational phenomenon to advance best practices for multiple constituents and help resolve existing difficulties with GVTs. Understanding leadership competencies for managing GVTs depends on a tighter coupling in the practice-research-practice cycle. Given turbulent competitive environments and more knowledge-based competition, research practices need to keep up with the rapid pace of change. At least three important trends about GVTs need to be addressed in the future.

First, GVTs will continue to grow in strategic importance. An important implication is that GVTs will face greater complexities and ambiguities. Furthermore, GVT leaders will have little or no contextual experience with their team members’ locations. This is a significant shift when globe-trotting managers often have face-to-face time with their team members in different locations. Thus, the need to create authentic emotional connections and accomplish the task at hand through multiple CMCSs will continue to be important

Second, another important trend is the rapid pace of technological innovations in telecommunications. New developments will create more future opportunities. For example, advances with media-rich technologies enable communication that narrows the gap between virtual and face-to-face interactions. However, there is little understanding about the relationship between technological adoption and team members from different cultural backgrounds. Given cultural differences, an important consideration would be how people will relate to technological innovations. This has implications for how leaders will manage GVTs. This research issue also has implications for firms engaged in developing CMCSs, because it will affect market adoption.

Last, although not least, organizations also will need to keep pace with the growth of GVTs by developing supporting policies, compensation schemes, and investments. GVT leaders can make important contributions to facilitate organizational development and change management.

The existing GVT literature has some preliminary theoretical developments that require rigorous empirical research. Future research needs to draw from intercultural management, organization development (OD), and CMCSs with interdisciplinary research teams. OD researchers and practitioners will provide an important contribution to different levels of change—individual, groups and teams, organizational, and interorganizational—as managers and organizations engage in change processes to incorporate GVTs for future strategic tasks.

CONCLUSION

The use of global virtual teams is a relatively new organizational design. GVTs allow organizations to span time, space, and organizational and national boundaries. But many organizational GVT practices have a trial and error approach that entails high costs and falls short of fulfilling expectations. The cost of establishing GVTs and their lackluster performance creates a demand for researchers to figure out how to resolve a range of complex issues. An important starting point is with the leadership for managing GVTs. Developing a balanced portfolio of five major leadership competencies—CMCS proficiency, work process and team designs, cross-cultural competence, interpersonal communication, and self-management—increases the likelihood of achieving high performance by GVTs.