Book Review: Cristina B. Gibson and Susan G. Cohen,Virtual Teams That Work: Creating Conditions for Virtual Team Effectiveness

Virtual teams are helping organizations move beyond their geographical boundaries to tap global resources. They are bringing together global best practices, increasing competitive strength of organizations, helping to take products and services to untapped markets and supporting the cost leadership by bringing down the establishment cost.

A virtual team offers many advantages but prescription for the same is restricted due to its very character, which hinders in the development of shared understanding, integration and trust. Most of the executives are accidental leaders/members of a virtual team, which makes them susceptible to wrong decision-making. This is where Virtual Teams That Work: Creating Conditions for Virtual Team Effectiveness fills in the gap.

Cristina B. Gibson and Susan G. Cohen, experts in the area of team effectiveness, with the support of chapter authors, who are familiar with the emerging literature on virtual teams, combine their knowledge of team literature and their disciplinary perspectives to highlight different conditions that make a virtual team efficient. They seem to have unanimously consider both business outcomes such as goal achievement, productivity, timeliness, organizational learning and customer satisfaction, and human outcomes such as commitment and satisfaction constitute team effectiveness measures. They recognize that capturing the mindshare of the employees is more challenging in a virtual set up than in a collocated arrangement, and as a disengaged employee wastes precious time and resources, they believe that aligning priorities, building relationships and gaining shared understanding must be allotted more upfront time.

This book breaks new ground. Each topic is well researched, making it an important reference for any further research on the topic for the academics. Inclusion of case studies and illustrative examples from multinational organizations give practitioners a real life picture on how organizations are impacted. Detailed actionable points bring solutions for addressing intricate issues that a virtual team grapples with.

Keeping a focused approach, the authors chose to define their research domain and narrowed the definition of virtual teams as a functional team consisting of individuals who—are independent in their task, share responsibility for outcomes, are geographically dispersed and rely on technology mediated communication. The domain still remains large enough to comprise management teams, product teams, service teams and others although it did limit the scope of generalizability to some extent.

The book is divided into five parts; the first part lays the foundation with three enabling conditions; the second part is about people and context covering topics like training, evaluation, pay system and calculating ROI for virtual teams; the third part addresses a very critical issue of knowledge management and information sharing; the fourth part aligns technology to context, task and structure; and finally the fifth part is about the process and development and brings the focus on conflict resolution and closing of the time gap.

Virtual teams come with an inherent advantage of having access to multiple resource sources and members coming from dissimilar locations and context bring in different experiences, but in the absence of a knowledge management system the team fails to leverage on its benefits. Author Martha L. Maznevski, an expert in the area of global and diverse teams, and Nicholas Athanassiou, having years of corporate experience, were able to: identify the practical difficulties and highlighted the antecedents that result in creating barriers for knowledge management, identified virtual teams as ‘sociotechnological systems’, and provide a road map for creation of social capital and emphasize on the technological aspects for creating infrastructure that supports sharing of explicit and tacit knowledge.

Another significant chapter, ‘The development of global virtual teams’, was based on data collected through several years of ethnographic fieldwork in major corporations addressing the critical issue of integrating members working across multiple context exploring pattern of change, growth or progression of a team to a more matured state through case illustrations making the chapter a lived-in experience for the readers. Another critical topic—designing reward system for virtual team is addressed by author Edward E. Lawler III, a distinguished professor, an author of many articles and books, and also a founder and director of the centre for effective organizations at the University of Southern California.

Concluding the book, authors summarize the valuable insights collected by the chapter authors and recommend few best practices to be followed. The thoroughness with which the book is presented does leave very little for asking, excepting few topics like change management, practising agile management, self-adapting networks and maybe data security.

Virtual teams, surely, provide sustainable solutions not only for the organization and employees but also for the environment by fuel and energy conservation. In today’s disruptive innovations age, virtual teams could provide the much needed flexibility to change and adapt. But unfortunately, we are unable to explore its full potential due to lack of solid research in this area since the phenomenon is still at its nascent stage. Contribution by each author of this book goes a long way in creating knowledge in this elusive field by providing direction for managing successful virtual teams.