GLOBALISATION OF BUSINESS, Syed Sajid [reading in the dark .txt] 📗

the team and was not an organizationally assigned function.

Second, this is an exploration of process, individual, and team design factors that contribute to effectiveness rather than a study of team outcomes (the team "outputs" of the model). We take the effectiveness of the team to be an outcome achieved only in part, since the work of the Future Search conference is still ongoing. Conference attendees have been invited to participate in an extension of the dialogue that was begun in Orlando through online forums, and work is currently being undertaken to use the conference outcomes in the development of a book. Instead, we focus here on factors that contributed to success in planning the Future Search conference in a virtual environment in which E-mail and teleconferences were our primary modes of communication.

One role of case studies is to test theory (Yin, 1994). The purpose of this exploratory study was to compare and contrast the experiences of the Future Search Steering Group to specific aspects of the TELM, using the model as a theoretical guide. Our goal was to draw some prescriptive lessons that can be applied by volunteer groups working in a virtual environment in the future. The study was guided by the following research questions:
• How did the experiences of the Future Search Steering Group fit with the TELM?
• How did team design, individual inputs, and process factors contribute to team effectiveness?
Methodology
Most case studies rely on multiple methods of data collection to ensure validity and reliability (Creswell, 1998). Two types of data were collected from the nine members of the FSSG during two months that followed the conference planning. Telephone interviews, lasting approximately one hour, covered the following: (a) the process of what makes a virtual planning experience successful; (b) individual factors contributing to motivation and commitment to participate in virtual planning; (c) team design factors, including leadership aspects of virtual collaboration; and (d) perceptions of group-level (collective) learning processes. All interviews were conducted by the same researcher, one of the paper's authors. Each team member was asked 13 open-ended questions, followed by probing questions for clarification, when necessary. All conversations were taped and professionally transcribed, resulting in 75 single-spaced pages of data gathered.

The FSSG members also completed ITAP International’s Global Team Process Questionnaire (GTPQ), a diagnostic instrument designed to help teams improve their effectiveness and productivity (Bing, 2001). As with all teams who use the instrument, this version of the GTPQ was customized for use with the FSSG. The instrument consisted of 19 close-ended items assessing such factors as equality of work distribution, clarity of team objectives, group communications, trust, conflict resolution, and leadership. Each item included a section for additional comments. The GTPQ questionnaire has been thoroughly tested for reliability and validity with global teams in the pharmaceutical, consumer products, and information technology fields for more than five years. For purposes of the questionnaire, a global team is one with members located in more than one country or one that has members from more than one country temporarily working in the same location (Bing, 2001). Mean scores were obtained for the GTPQ close-ended items. Transcriptions of the taped telephone interviews and open-ended comments from the GTPQ were analyzed for themes by the paper co-authors.
Results and Findings
Four major themes emerged from the interviews and open-ended comments on the GTPQ within this virtual, geographically dispersed team: (a) the importance of energizing and highly effective leadership; (b) intrinsic rewards that motivated individuals; (c) the necessity of a trustful environment, and (d) specific "enabling" virtual communication techniques and protocols. These will be described and related to three aspects of the TELM: team design, individual input factors, and process criteria.
Team Design Factors
Team design factors relevant to the TELM model included a narrowly focused task (organize a Future Search conference with 64 key leaders in the field of HRD); a tight deadline (four months); and volunteer FSSG team membership from within ASTD's Research-to-Practice committee. The nine-member FSSG team was composed of five core members, one volunteer facilitator from outside the ranks of ASTD, two ASTD research officers in liaison roles, and one member in an ASTD administrative role. A clear line of "authority" in the form of team commitment to the success of the project for ASTD and AHRD existed, although the sponsoring organizations exerted little, if any, formal control mechanisms.

Of these design factors, the volunteer composition and the energizing and shared leadership within the team were credited with successful completion of the task. At first blush, the volunteer nature of the team appeared happenstance, with one member noting that "when we put the team together we gave no real consideration to the relative strength or the working styles of the individuals." However, interviews revealed subtle self-selection criteria among those who volunteered: (a) keen interest in an intellectually stimulating project; (b) desire to contribute to the field of HRD; and (c) desire to enhance working relationships with valued colleagues.

Team members reflected on what kept them going as the project grew in size and intensity, with some spending as much as 20 hours a week outside of their regular jobs at the peak of activity. Working with respected colleagues was a key factor: "I've been more motivated by the chance to work with [team members] than I have the thought of we're going to put a fantastic book out ... I get a lot from the relationships ... on the steering group."
This desire to work with "a finely tuned team of professionals" was, for many, a compelling reason to join the FSSG, but all acknowledged that what maintained the team's momentum was energizing and highly effective leadership, a role that was shared by several team members. Early on in the project, the member who had volunteered to lead the team began clustering various tasks into "blocks" of work; team members volunteered to spearhead a block of work and were called "blockheads," a term that was one of the group's many inside jokes. Dividing up the task and then monitoring the resulting progress became a coordinating leadership role that was essential to effective team management. Team members agreed, however, that leadership actions were dispersed, with the informal leadership role within the group assumed primarily by another member of the team. Instead of vying for competing roles, team members welcomed others' leadership efforts and attributed this to the volunteer nature of the team:
[G]iven the nature of the project and the fact that we're all volunteers, I think you've got to have somebody who's pushing it forward all the time ... we each divide up the work and take on different components but [team member A] invariably will jump in and do a little bit just to shove it along ... it always seems to be good stuff and it tends to make you think and keep pushing a little harder yourself.
Individual Factors
While energizing and shared leadership and the volunteer nature of the team were deemed essential team design factors, individual input factors also contributed heavily to successful task completion. The TELM model considers interpersonal behaviors as the foundation for individual inputs and a direct function of team members’ interests, motivations, skills, abilities, values, and attitudes. For the members of this virtual team, individual factors provided intrinsic rewards and created a trusting environment that made success possible.

One of the GTPQ questions specifically asked about the equitable distribution of such intangibles as participation, project visibility, authorship of the book, and editorship of papers and conference articles--all motivational factors in the minds of team members. Most team members agreed that everyone had an opportunity to contribute in areas that interested them--"everyone gets a piece of the action"-- while one member noted "it's not an issue of trying to be greedy and hog all the glory (none of us has time for it!) … [but] I think some of us have more visibility in certain areas … this is a high-stakes issue because a book authorship is an extremely tangible professional accomplishment." Learning about the Future Search methodology (Weisbord, 1992; Weisbord & Janoff, 2000) and learning about teamwork in a virtual environment were motivating factors, as well:
I've also learned how an ongoing virtual conversation ... can contribute to collective efforts that far exceed what any one individual can do ... this has been a tremendous learning, for my experience in face-to-face task forces and group efforts had led me to believe that a few people usually do all or most of the work. Here the work was truly shared according to each person's ability to contribute.
An attitude of respect for professional colleagues permeated the virtual experience for team members. Each had an opportunity to contribute his or her own special interests and talents, and each trusted that others would see their portion of the work through to completion. The ability to do high-quality individual work that was then brought back to the team for discussion was a repeatedly mentioned theme: "For a project of this complexity to work, you've got to have people on the team that can run with whatever their passion is ... for the team to disperse and people to be doing their thing and bring it back and let the team crunch on it."

Good written and oral communication skills proved essential in a virtual conversation. Clearly, members realized that it was important that they make allowances for different modes of individual expression and create what one called an attitude of "slack": "There's something around creating slack ... Giving people the benefit of the doubt when they appear to be on your territory or saying something that's negative." Thus, motivated by an opportunity to work with respected colleagues, to share in tangible outcomes according to each team member's interests and abilities, and to learn from one another created the necessary trust for virtual collaboration.
Process Criteria
In addition to team design and individual inputs, our lessons learned came from many process factors, some of which we stumbled into and others that we created intentionally. The TELM model considers process criteria to be the effort expended, the knowledge and skills brought to bear, the planned strategy or techniques adopted, and the group dynamics that emerge from collective action.

Pre-existing relationships among the Research-to-Practice committee members that had been established in a face-to-face environment proved essential to commitment in a virtual one. Telephone conferences added the emotion of tone and voice to messages exchanged electronically, and, most importantly, humor created and sustained a shared group culture that grew through the weeks of conference preparation. One member referred to the "lubricant of a keen sense of humor" and noted that it was hard to get tense in a flurry of metaphors and one-liners. "I think the teleconferences ... help glue things together for us. They re-establish ... you can hear the chuckle that goes with the joke." Without the pre-existing relationships, most doubted that the team would have been able to collaborate so easily and with such clarity.

All acknowledged that more was shared in this team culture than the occasional humorous remark that lightened the workload: Each team member's commitment to the task and to the other members functioned to prop up the group as a whole and maintained a "high level of intensity" without a long lag time between virtual meetings or E-mail exchanges. E-mails were characterized as "rapid fire." No sooner did a message go out than a flurry of responses picked up the dialogue exchange. While conducive to capturing the flavor of real-time conversation, this also proved disconcerting at times for our London colleague:
Every now and then I’d go to bed at ten o’clock which is five Eastern [time] having checked all my E-mails and being up to date and while I'm asleep dialogue is taking place in North America ... And I wake up the following morning