Dispersed Teams Need to Get Off on the Right Foot
by Valerie I. Sessa, Michael C. Hansen, Michael E. Kossler, and Sonya Prestridge
The changing global marketplace and technological advancements have led to the creation of teams that are spread across countries and continents. This has occurred so rapidly that organizations' use of geographically dispersed teams has far outstripped knowledge about how such teams operate. In what ways, for instance, do they differ from traditional teams? Now the latest research by CCL sheds light on how members of dispersed teams interact, how to best build and support such teams, and how dispersed teams achieve their goals.
Global markets spread the means of production and the flow of capital as organizations embrace technologies that enable communication and collaboration around the world and across time. Workers find themselves serving on teams with people they have never met and whose native countries they know little about. An increasing number of employees are learning new languages, working extremely odd hours, and relying heavily on colleagues thousands of miles and multiple time zones away. Welcome to the age of the geographically dispersed team (GDT).
As the marketplace undergoes global change and the technological capabilities for communicating across distance and time advance, conventional teams are evolving into GDTs, spread across countries and continents. During this time of change, some management theorists have suggested that the communication and performance challenges posed by dispersed collaboration essentially force the creation of GDTs as entities entirely different from traditional teams. But is that really the case?
The practice of using GDTs has far outpaced the scientific understanding of how they function. Although dispersed collaboration is not exactly new (think of tasks accomplished with the aid of telephones, postal mail, and air travel), recent technological advances and their results—including the public's large-scale adoption of the Internet—have greatly increased the use and proliferation of GDTs among organizations. But there have been few research efforts aimed at better understanding what is needed to build and support GDTs, how GDT members interact, and how GDTs achieve their goals.
What research has been done on GDTs hasn't come up with many conclusive findings. That's not unusual; many organizational trends outpace researchers' ability to construct insightful studies. For its own starting point, the Center for Creative Leadership looked to two fields of research that provide information relevant to GDTs. The first focuses on computer-mediated communication; the second probes the use of group decision support systems.
Research into computer-mediated communication has frequently compared the communication patterns and effectiveness of groups that collaborate by means of some type of computer system (e-mail or electronic bulletin boards, for example) with those of groups that meet face to face.
Similarly, researchers studying group decision support systems have compared the performances of groups that use computer-based tools for idea generation, evaluation, and decision making against the performances of groups that don't use such tools.
Collectively, findings from these two fields of inquiry suggest that although there are similarities between conventional teams and teams that interact via communication technology, there are also important differences:
• Computer-mediated teams tend to be more task oriented and to have more equal participation among team members than conventional teams.
• Technology may alter social behavior in teams.
• Members of technology-based teams are typically less satisfied with the team experience than are members of conventional teams. However, this doesn't appear to greatly affect the quality of team output.
• Technology-based teams frequently take longer to complete their work than do conventional teams, and they are slower to follow common team-development stages. There is evidence, however, that performance improves for GDTs after they are given time to grow accustomed to their tasks and dispersed situations.
Despite these intriguing findings, laboratory studies haven't sufficiently captured the myriad challenges facing GDTs, including team formation, meeting logistics, and conflict resolution. CCL's research into GDTs bridges the divide between highly controlled laboratory investigations of communication technology's impact and real-life observations of firsthand witnesses about the challenges posed by dispersed teamwork.
CCL began its research with a survey conducted between August 1997 and August 1998 that gathered information from forty-five teams in nineteen organizations. All the teams had members in at least three dispersed locations. Fifteen teams had all their members, including the team leader, based in the United States, and two had all their members, including the team leader, based outside the United States. In twenty-three of the teams the team leader was based in the United States, but some team members were outside the United States. In five of the teams the team leader was based outside the United States, but some team members were based in the United States.
The survey was designed to reveal how organizations form, develop, and maintain GDTs.
Using the core data from the survey, we targeted the second stage of the CCL research along four lines:
• How is being in a GDT similar to or different from being in a traditional, co-located team (that is, a team whose members reside in the same place and work in close physical proximity to one another)? What are the advantages and disadvantages of being in a GDT?
Factoring in the Variables
In the framework of the Team Effectiveness Leadership Model, individual, environmental, and team design factors are seen as having an influence on team processes, which are in turn viewed as influencing team results. In the model, these relationships are classified as inputs, process, and outputs.
Inputs. Individual factors connect to what team members bring to the team. These factors include interests and motivations, skills and abilities, values and attitudes, and interpersonal behavior skills. Environmental factors encompass four systems that exist in an organizational structure and that affect an organization's teams: rewards, education, information, and control. Team design factors relate to the team itself–its structure, composition, norms, and authority.
Process. This part of the model includes the amount of effort expended on the task, the knowledge and skills used to accomplish the task, strategies used while working on the task, and the general group dynamics.
Outputs. In defining the results of the team's work, this group of factors comprises three appraisals. First, does the team's output (goods, services, and decisions) meet the quantity, quality, and timeliness standards of the people who use that output? Second, does the group process that occurs while the group is performing its task enhance the ability of the members to work together as a team in the future? And third, does the group experience enhance the personal wellbeing of the individuals who make up the team?
• How do factors such as organizational structure, team design, and individual experience affect a GDT's first team meeting, its team processes, and its performance?
• How does the effectiveness of the first team meeting relate to subsequent team processes, such as ongoing meeting effectiveness, use of technology, team dynamics, and team performance?
• How do team processes relate to team performance?
To help focus our research on group effectiveness within GDTs, we framed our questions using a comprehensive team effectiveness model developed through observation of traditional teams and reviews of the literature on them. In particular we adopted as a guide the Team Effectiveness Leadership Model, which Richard L. Hughes, Robert C. Ginnett, and Gordon J. Curphy published in 1993 (see sidebar above).
We placed our four research questions in this framework with the aim of illuminating our understanding of how the first team meeting influences team effectiveness, especially in GDTs. The following overview of our conclusions will interest all managers and executives who lead, design, sponsor, or otherwise have a stake in the effectiveness and success of GDTs in their organizations.