Role of Employees in Crisis Management
The art of managing an emergency situation at the workplace through effective planning and quick action refers to crisis management. An unstable condition which leads to major disturbances at the workplace must be controlled immediately for effective functioning of the organization. Crisis Management helps the employees as well as organization to cope with difficult times […]
Managing Social Isolation in Virtual Teams
Virtual workplace is a new age reality of 21st century organizations. Though on one hand it offers flexibility and adaptability to the virtual team members but the lack of face-to-face interactions associated with virtual workplace, many a times, leave the members feeling socially isolated and abandoned. Research studies indicate that some level of social interactions […]
Role of Leaders/Managers in Crisis Management
A sequence of sudden, unplanned and unexpected events leading to instability in the organization and major unrest amongst the individuals is called as crisis. Crisis generally arises on a short notice and causes major disturbances at the workplace. Leaders and managers play an extremely important role during crisis. One should lead from the front. Show […]
Work Culture – Meaning, Importance & Characterics of a Healthy Culture
An organization is formed to achieve certain goals and objectives by bringing individuals together on a common platform and motivating them to deliver their level best. It is essential for the employees to enjoy at the workplace for them to develop a sense of loyalty towards it. Work culture plays an important role in extracting […]
Power as a Managerial Tool
Since time immemorial power has been a thing desired, coveted, feared and sometimes unleashed too to give people what they needed. From the courtrooms of the kings to the boardrooms of top leaders, power has held an integral part in determining how things get done. So, what is power in relevance to the modern-day originations […]
Most of the discussion about the virtual teams is centered around 100% virtual teams i.e. pure virtual team. Earlier only the extent of geographical distribution of team was used to determine the virtuality of teams. But now more and more research is being conducted to look at other dimensions which affect the level of virtuality.
If we look at the present workplace scenario, there is rarely any team which fits the definition of a pure co-located team or that of a pure virtual team.
Virtuality is a continuum in which the pure co-located team and pure virtual team represents the two extremes. Most of the current teams fall in between these two extremes.
For example videoconferencing enables members to see each other and it gives a feeling of a boardroom meeting thus it involves a low level of virtuality whereas email enables members to only share written information thus it involves high level of virtuality. So the richer the communication media, the lower is the level of virtuality.
If the members are engaged in real-time exchange of information as with videoconferencing or instant messaging, it is as good as face-to-face interactions, thus the level of virtuality is low. While in case of asynchronous information exchange, there is interruption in interactions, this result in higher level of virtuality.
In addition to the above three there are other factors such as number and location of work sites as well as the types of culture and languages of virtual team members.
Thus we see that virtuality of a team is largely interplay of these three dimensions. Various combinations of these three dimensions results in the different levels of virtuality on the continuum. A highly virtual team is one in which members are located in opposite time zones, hence they use only emails for communication plus there is a time lag between each response, then such a team has high level of virtuality. The members of this team never get to understand the personality, body language and non-verbal cues of each other. Based on our understanding of the level of virtuality, we can customize and deploy the essential strategies to build an effective virtual team.
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