CHAPTER I – INTRODUCTION
1.1 Global and virtual Business
Companies will need to balance their necessity for a unified global culture with local strategic and cultural differences and make core global values locally relevant and easily understandable for all employees. Operating in a global economy will create even more demand for leaders with global experience. This means it will be more important for key talent to have expatriate experience. Companies will find their best people anywhere in the world, so successful workers will be willing to work outside their home country. The concept of off-shoring will not exist in the future and talent will exist globally and companies will go where the talent is. The purpose will not be to get the lowest-cost labor, but rather the highest-quality talent. This will be especially true with technical and creative workers. Global companies will become more adept at managing a global enterprise on a 24/7 basis, with more management and technology systems in place to allow work to be easily passed around the world. There will be a more progressive use of partnerships and alliances across functions, organizations and customers to build more collaborative and innovative ways to compete and win market share. Societies throughout the world will focus on work as a more important crucible for social progress and values. The memory of today’s financial crisis will leave a legacy of greater scrutiny and regulation of issues such as fairness, pay differentials and ethics, particularly in traditional Western economies (Workforce Management, December 2008); millennials will redefine work, doing work at home and taking home to work; this means blurring the boundaries of life and work; More workforce mobility will allow people to work from home at different hours.
1.2 Relevance
In the information technology (IT) century the distances get shorter and the languages have broken the walls because the technology has changed more easily everything in the e-business world. The use of IT tools is growing every year in different processes in the companies. “Recruitment and development will increasingly be seen as part of an integrated workforce-supply optimization process. Both will become virtual, global and just-in-time, but they will also be transformed through an increasing emphasis on optimization, differentiation and return on investment”. (Workforce Management, December 2008), social networks and wikis will to support building strong relationships and collaboration between the virtual teams and face-to-face members of the companies; the structure of work will become more adaptive, more informal and less focused on formal structures and static design solutions. The HR professionals will have competencies in finding and retaining talent and in managing contract and freelance workers locally and internationally.
Technological progress and the evolution of virtual networks and social vetting—that is, using formal networks such as LinkedIn or social networks as twitter or facebook to establish trust and research people’s backgrounds—will increase workplace flexibility. The trends will increase the use of emerging work structures that involve engaging professional and social networks through means such as "crowd sourcing"—when an organization invites the public to help solve a problem (Qualman, 2010).
The talent market will look a lot more like eBay than Monster or Yahoo HotJobs. Candidates will put themselves up for bid for specific work; hours and duration will name their minimum price, including benefits and perks; employers will contract with each worker for what will be delivered (Workforce Management, December 2008).
1.3 Objective of study
This research has the objective to find if companies are using social networks as a tool for teamwork; how is changing the leadership and the teamwork into the companies who use it; is formal or informal use it; is ethical or is an disadvantage for the employee.
In sum, this study aims to address the following questions:
How is the leadership in the virtual teams who use social networks as tool in teamwork?
Is the Time an important factor for creating trust between team members?
What happens if the virtual team members get in touch by social networks before start to work?
Is recommended that virtual teamwork have face-to-face meetings when the project is for long time? How should be for the projects in short time?
Are virtual teamwork recording evidence of their work?
If you saw the perfil (In whatever social network) of one of yours teammate before of sharing information, Could be an important factor in faithfulness on the kind information sharing? And what happen when that information come from the team leader?
CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Virtual teamwork
Organizational teams can be defined as a set of individuals who perceive themselves and whom outsiders perceive as constituting an identifiable social aggregate within the organization (Richter, Scully, & West, 2005); teamwork is considered to be some of the more important work done in today’s organizations, (Parker 1996). In fact, organizations presuppose teamwork. Without teamwork at some level of cooperation, organizations cannot exist. Teams are considered to be the “standard operating procedure” in most high tech organizations and teams have become an important topic of study in the last decade. Advances in information and communications technology have enabled teams to work together in a virtual environment on tasks that at one time were assumed to require face-to-face meetings. The enabling of virtual team work occurred in parallel with competitive pressures that have forced many companies to shorten product development windows and reduce costs by outsourcing internationally. Organizations increasingly view virtual teams as a means to increase their flexibility and responsiveness while reducing costs (Haywood, 1998); (Hoefling, 2001); (Karolak, 1998); (Mitchell, 2001).
One of the defining characteristics of a virtual team is the computationally enabled and enhanced nature of its communication (Cummings & Kiesler, 2008). Defining characteristics of a virtual team is that it has a distribution of team members across time, geography or both. Virtual teams rarely (or never) meet face-to-face and depend on information and communications technology for their coordination and collaboration (Bell, 2002). Virtual teams can be characterized by their cultural or geographic similarity, temporal distribution and life cycle (Bell, 2002); (Kristof, 1995).
A rapid growing trend in the era of information technology is the increased prevalence of virtual teams in which members work collaboratively in geographically dispersed locations, given that advances in IT facilitate communication and the sharing of information among virtual team members (Shachaf, 2008). Virtual teams may range dramatically in terms of the degree to which they utilize virtuality, with some only communicating using highly virtual tools such as instant messaging and teleconferencing, while others are less virtual, making use of videoconferencing and regularly scheduled face to face meetings.
As good communication and interaction add to the depth and richness of mutual understanding between the members of virtual teams, management should keep upgrading IT facilities and tools that help communication and interaction so that shared vision, perceived trust, and perceived benefit can be enhanced to the anticipated extent. Management should keep in mind that there is no ‘‘one size fits all” solution for enhanced perceived job effectiveness, by purely, for example, encouraging cooperative attitude and discarding competitive conflict. Virtual teams count heavily on e-mail, chat tools, social networks, online conference, instant messaging or other online systems to accomplish their teamwork.
Companies need to have in mind that is necessary considered the following factor for excellent job effectiveness like a good leadership, trust between team members, knowledge sharing, cooperative attitude and competitive conflict it must avoided as they can when its mean individual self interest, may favor cooperation even if all members of a group would benefit in their cooperation with one another according to the prisoner’s dilemma from game theory. Competitive conflict is defined as a perceived state of discord due to a rivalry between team members for benefits, resources or territory. Although traditional theories suggest that competitive conflict among team members is likely to undermine their job performance due to its catalysis to increased tension (e.g.,Passos & Caetano, 2005; Richter et al., 2005).
2.2 Sharing Knowledge
Knowledge sharing is defined as individuals’ sharing organizationally relevant experiences and information with one another in collaboration, increasing the resources of an organization or a team and reducing time wasted in trial-and-error (Lin, 2007a; Lin, 2007b).
However, we cannot say that simply by assigning formal facilitators will contribute to a high performance team. What the literature found is that it was the way the facilitators performed their role that mattered most than the mere availability of facilitators.
The competence and skills of a facilitator, formal or informal, in bringing individuals together and in encouraging the use of collaborative technologies and the development of shared understanding can foster an atmosphere of collaboration and trust building within the virtual team environment and allowed to be distributed effectively.
Knowledge sharing across team members can be both competitive and cooperative in nature (Luo et al., 2006). The competitive nature often happens since knowledge can generate private gains for individuals to outperform their counterparts (Luo et al., 2006). Cooperative attitude involves the recognition that individual team members may benefit from working complementarily (Brandenburger & Nalebuff, 1996). Put differently, those members whose knowledge adds value to the work of their co-workers are likely to share knowledge (Levy et al., 2003), Developing a shared vision strategically among individual members of the teams is critical in team collaboration (Ferioli & Migliarese, 1996), because a shared vision reflects an important agreement of beliefs and assumptions that consequently bring about internal stability to the cooperative attitude (Henderson & Sifonis, 1988), suggesting its positive influence on cooperative attitude.
2.3 Trust between virtual team members
Trust can be defined as a relationship of reliance among members of a team or an organization. The importance of trust in successful interpersonal relationships has been discussed in previous research (Neves & Caetano, 2009; Sargeant & Lee, 2004). Individuals aim to practice cooperation with other team members when they perceive the members to be trustworthy. The cooperation that captures the level of coordinated actions between team members in their efforts to achieve mutual goals cannot be realized without trust among the members (Palmatier, Dant, Grewal, & Evans, 2006). Indeed, given that perceived trust can be defined as a member’s expectation that another member desires co-ordination, will fulfill obligations, and will pull weight in the relationship (Dwyer, Schurr, & Oh, 1987; Peters & Karren, 2009), team members who possess trust on their peers are perceived to be under obligation not to undermine their team collaboration (Morris et al., 2007), indicating the positive relationship between perceived trust and cooperative attitude.
Moreover, studies suggests that shared goals may be used to minimize power imbalances and the exercise of coercive power, by driving progress through the pursuit of mutually beneficial objectives based on a perceived equity of return. It is important to highlight that knowledge is becoming the source of power in the current digital age and this power moves to the knowledge source. When virtual team relationships are damaged and internal confusion exists, managers need to begin the task of rebuilding trust in the pursuit of developing as best as possible collaborative global virtual teams.
Management attempting to boost cooperation in their teams within a short period should arrange a get together or workshop so that team trust can be built efficiently given that virtual teams are sometimes temporary ones and have no sufficient time for members to foster trust with each other. As good communication and interaction add to the depth and richness of mutual understanding between the members of virtual teams, management should keep upgrading IT facilities and tools that help communication and interaction so that shared vision, perceived trust, and perceived benefit can be enhanced to the anticipated extent.
Jarvenpaa and Leidner (1998) studied in detail the electronic communications of the highest and lowest trust teams in their study of global virtual teams. The high trust teams sent early, positive email messages and kept a strong, sustained focus on action and task results, reinforced by frequent communication. In contrast, the low trust teams were markedly less active throughout their life cycle. People may tend to start out trusting others, but members of both types of teams need to meet work expectations early in order to maintain the trusting environment.
2.4 Leadership in virtual teamwork
In order to keep a team on track and fulfilling its potential, a leadership function that must be performed is the monitoring of the team. This function is not limited to only monitoring team members’ processes and performance, but also extends to monitoring the environment (Hackman & Walton, 1986; McGrath, 1962; Tukl, 1989). Team monitoring provides critical information to team members that influence the impact of subsequent leadership functions. When team monitoring is present, team leaders are seen as more effective and the team is more cohesive (Kane, Zaccaro, Tremble, & Masuda, 2002).
Due to increased complexity in ensuring effective team processes when faced with virtual and distributed team environments, leadership behaviors may often be shared among members. Shared leadership has been defined multiple ways, but across researchers there appears to be a unified agreement that shared leadership involves team members distributing leadership responsibilities amongst themselves, without negating the possibility of vertical leadership (Pearce & Conger, 2003). As with the broader leadership literature there have been a variety of leadership behaviors and/or functions which have been argued to be the content of shared leadership (Morgeson, DeRue, & Karam, 2009). Many researchers have looked at the components that predict the success of these shared leadership behaviors and the impact it has in a variety of environments (Carson, Tesluk, & Marrone, 2007; Merkens & Spencer, 1998).
Shared leadership may be particularly important to virtual teams, where team members’ separation from the leader and from one another may necessitate the distribution of leadership functions. While the sharing of leadership has proven to be advantageous to more traditional forms of vertical leadership (Pearce, Yoo, & Alvai, 2004), Klein et al (2006) found that in shared leadership work environments, teams that were more effective had leaders that were able to recognize when it was necessary to either delegate responsibilities or directly intervene to maintain high levels of performance.
A recent review of the leadership literature proposes four sources of leadership, broken down into two structural dimensions: locus of leadership (internal vs. external) and formality of leadership (informal vs. formal). In this review, Morgeson, DeRue, and Karam (2009) describe an external leader as one that is not involved in day-to-day tasks, while an internal leader is seen as an equal within the group. A formal leader is directly assigned to be a leader (e.g., immediate supervisor, project lead, and the like), while an informal leader is described more as an advisor, someone that does not come into the leadership position by direct assignment. Shared leadership has been conceptualized in many ways (Carson, Tesluk, & Marrone, 2007; Friedrich, et al. 2009), but the underlying theme among these definitions is that shared leadership involves the distribution of the leadership responsibilities within the team (see Jackson, 2000; Lambert, 2002; Pearce & Conger, 2003), there has been some empirical research suggesting that when virtual team leaders provide evaluative and systematic feedback, there is a greater degree of team identification and commitment (Sivunen, 2006).
CHAPTER II METHODOLOGY
3.1 Interview
An interview is a conversation between two or more people (the interviewer and the interviewee) where questions are asked by the interviewer to obtain information from the interviewee (Wikipedia, 2010). I want to use interview because are particularly useful for getting the story behind a participant’s experiences. The interviewer can pursue in-depth information around the topic. Interviews may be useful as follow-up to certain respondents to questionnaires, e.g., to further investigate their responses. (McNamara, 1999)
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