2013_6209_Wings: Sophia's Individual Self-Reflection

COMMUNICATION,

THE KEY OF VIRTUAL TEAM COLLABORATION

MGT 6209 Individual Self-reflection for Final Project

by ZHANG Liyun（Sophia） 52790193

Introduction

This report is an individual blog reflection for the group project in the course MGT 6609 High Performance Collaboration. This project was titled Virtual Expansion: Building VirtualXXX.com between Two Virtual Teams, which aims to give us a virtual team experience and encourage to reflect upon with using class concepts in this virtual environment.

In the project, the members of two virtual teams must from different classes. Two virtual teams should communicate with some virtual way, such as phone, fax, e-mail, Skype, etc., replacing face-to-face. Besides, two teams would represent two organizations or companies from different industries (local or multinational) separately. The type of collaboration could be expanding products, services, production, markets, virtual community, etc. of only one or both sides of the teams.

In this report, I would give out the self-reflection of my learning journal on the virtual collaborative experience in virtual teams.

Virtual Collaboration in the Group Project

About the group

This group consists of two virtual teams including 7 members (three from evening class and four from morning class). Two teams have completely different structure. The team from morning class, Quartet, has four members who all coming from Information Systems Department. While members from evening team have different background separately, Information Systems Department, Electronic Engineering Department and Management Department. Besides in these 7 members, some have more than 6 years working experience some have no experience. And all of them come from different areas of China.

Various backgrounds are rarely bringing a single factor, such as culture, language, conception, the way of thinking, etc. Meanwhile, these factors effect the collaboration in both positive and negative aspects. In terms of team diversity

Why we choose the idea for collaboration?

Firstly we should understand the definition of collaboration. The word ‘collaboration’ that often be used, in its history is a term born from Western culture. In different fields, obviously, the explanations are different. While Wikipedia gives the explanation that Collaboration is working with each other to do a task.It is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals, (this is more than the intersection of common goals seen in co-operative ventures, but a deep, collective, determination to reach an identical objective⁾, for example, an intriguing endeavorthat is creative in nature—by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. Most collaboration requires leadership, although the form of leadership can be social within a decentralized and egalitarian group. In particular, teams that work collaboratively can obtain greater resources, recognition and reward when facing competition for finite resources. An uncommon case for using, collaboration is present in opposing goals exhibiting the notion of adversarial collaboration.

In this project, the concrete implementations of our collaboration are playing different parties of a virtual team. One is a non-government non-profit organization named Senior Citizen Caring Center (abbreviated as SCCC), while the other is the psychological department of several universities. More details that we have designed the background of these two organizations are as below.

SCCC (the NGO), established in 2000 and located in Beijing, specializes in organizing volunteers to provide various services to senior citizens in the urban area of Beijing. It has stable number of volunteers from all works of life and can cover most areas of service except some requiring quite special and extended knowledge, such as legal and psychological disciplines. On the other hand, the psychological department of university, on the other side, has a great number of students at the graduate stage. They are longing for opportunities to practice the mastered concepts and principles but are found rarely accepted as interns by professional psychological companies due to lack of practical experience. The collaboration comes form a society problem of Mainland China, a great number of empty nest elderly.

Meanwhile the determined of this idea is not made in a vacuum. We design this project with considering about the characteristics of each team and individuals, which is an effective use of team diversity. Team QUARTET has background of living, studying and working in Beijing. And our team has background of working experience in NGO. Besides all of us have the situation in terms of empty-nester problems in our families.

New to Virtual team

This project is my first experience of virtual team. Any other group projects or works I have done before are all in a traditional way. While, firstly in this project I have understood, a virtual team is defined as "a group of people working together across time and space, using electronic communication technology."

Communication & Role to technology

“When working collaboratively with a team at a distance, using your communication tools effectively can make a huge difference in your team’s success,” advises Pabini Gabriel-Petit (2009). “If possible, use instant messaging and phone calls rather than email to stay on top of things. Relying on two-way communication will help you to avoid misunderstandings. “

Communication play a key role in this project, while I divide the way of our communication into two types, the one is FACE&FIRTUAL, the other is COMPLETELY VIRTUAL.

a) Interpersonal communication into GROUP WINGS

· Face-to-Face

It is the most efficient way to discuss. If we have some important idea or decisions need to be discussed, we always use Face-to-face. Because every comment or communication triggers has an immediate response and therefore makes it a very efficient as well as effective way of communicating.

· E-mail

Communicating with e-mail is simply and easily to record the time and communication content, which helps our group members review the discussion. It can clutter up the e-mail inbox and every missing information triggers a sequence of at least two new emails.

· Apps (WeChat, QQ, Weibo)

Some new technology used for contact with each other. These ways are so smart that we can use these apps to appoint discussion time, remind others to check the e-mail.

b) Virtual teams communication

· Skype

Without face-to-face communication, we decided to have Skype meeting to discuss some important topics in a more efficient and effective way. It is quite difficult to have a meeting via Skype with several people, because you cannot see when someone wants to speak and many times two people speak at the same time.

· E-mail

· Apps (WeChat, QQ, Weibo)

Some new technology used for contact with each other. These ways are so smart that we can use these apps to appoint discussion time, remind others to check the e-mail.

· Dropbox

Quit useful to share documents, meeting records, etc.

Benefits & Conflicts

Throughout this project we find the benefits of Virtual teams is obvious, as below:

· Greater autonomy

· Greater sense of connectedness

· Greater equality

· A greater sense of accomplishment

· Greater accountability

But if we ignore the conflicts of virtual teams it would be a falsity. Main conflicts among inter-team collaboration could be shown as below:

1. Different schedules and hard to arrange meeting time: this can make it difficult to communicate in real time.

2. Different ideas attacking: it is difficult to detect any lack of engagement between virtual teams, which can lead to efficiency.

3. Minimal nonverbal communication: obviously, the problem above is almost due to the difficulties in virtual team communications, which lack nonverbal visual cues. And it is integral in developing trust and clear messaging.

4. We have personal e-mail addresses and also have a group e-mail address, so sometimes would check the wrong email and miss email.

Conclusions

This project is my first experience of virtual team collaboration. The lack of experience consumed me a lot of time and energy. Meanwhile, many problems have been encountered in the process of project doing, which made me think more about how to have a high-performance collaboration in a virtual team.

Ø A successful virtual need an effective team leader, which we don’t have in this project, could determine some important strategies and make the work more effective.

Ø Have at least one time face-to-face online meeting (with Skype), which would help to build trust among team members.

Ø Establish norms upfront, and create team agreements. This would make many things easy.

Ø Establish schedule table for the team would be helpful to meeting time arrangement.

Ø A rule for virtual meeting is also necessary. Making a communication environment would benefit the collaboration between virtual team members.

In summary, this project gives me a great experience of virtual team collaboration, which has improved my analysis, communicating, social capability, leadership, responsibility, presentation & writing skills. Besides, more thankfully, this course gives me not only knowledge and experience but also full of passion and fun in every class.

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Reference

Why Virtual Teams? , Gail Terry Grimes and Claude Whitmyer, Co-Founders The University of the Future, LLC, 2009.
Real Stratigies for Virtual Organizing, N.Venkatraman, JohnC.Henderson, Sloan Management Review, 1998.
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_team
How to Work with People that You Rarely See, Jennell Evans, SMART@WORK, 2011
Teamwork and Collaboration Across Departments, Janet M. Six, Ask UXmatters, 2011

Sophia's Individual Self-Reflection