LEUNG, Pui Man (Alice): Final Individual Blog Reflection

My Learning Journal of a Virtual Collaboration in Virtual Teams

Near the middle of MGT6209 High Performance Collaborations course, we were given a term-end group assignment to work with our corresponding team from the morning class. In this assignment, the two teams were to represent two companies of different industries and innovate for a new entrepreneurial adventure in a virtual manner. Eventually we had to blog about what a winning virtual collaboration experience should be and how it could be achieved by reflecting upon the concepts we learned in class. In the following paragraph I documented what and how things happened in our virtual team experience to share my learning journey.

What Happened in Our Virtual Team Practices

• Means of communication: We, Team Chopsticks which consists of three working ladies from administrative fields, partnered with Kite & Wind which consists of 2 girls and 1 guys who came from Mainland China to pursue full-time postgraduate studies. The assignment required no face-to-face discussion. Therefore, we mainly communicated by emails and set up a whatsapp group for urgent questions since mid-March. As we take it professional to act as if we are real company representatives, the content of our communications are mainly exchanges of our business ideas and reminders of the next milestone. We managed to drop each other some lines every week since we had regular sharing session in respective classes which were good opportunities to catch our course instructor’s feedback for relaying to the other team.
• Quality of coordination: As the nature of our assignment is to make an innovation, there should not be any precedent example to follow and members are encouraged to throw their ideas freely. Like what Allen concluded, “When you are working with creative minds, it's crucial to keep them on track so they don’t go off on tangents and disrupt the project’s rhythm or production schedule” (Hillmann et al., 2005). Off-tracking happened when members got lost in trawling an agreement amidst a sea of single lines of exchanges. We later coordinate better with some members taking an active management role of emailing out summary tables and timelines while others keep fine-tuning ideas in order to make sure everyone is working on the same page.
• Decision-making: Lipnack and Stamps found that a shared or distributed leadership among team members rather than centralized leadership is more likely to happen in a virtual team (cited in Chen, Wu, Yang & Tsou, 2008, p.305). To effect actions effectively, a leader should not only take up “the process of making sense of what people are doing together so that people will understand and be committed” as suggested by Drath and Palus but also “exhibit contrary or opposing behaviors (as appropriate as necessary) while still retaining some measure of integrity, credibility, and direction” as suggested by Denison, Hooijberg, and Quinn (cited in Chen, Wu, Yang & Tsou, 2008, p.307). Two teams of us assembled in a short period of time in the context of a university course, lacking a prior understanding of each other. However, our common value of the team project is explicit: to get the job done for a reasonable grade. Therefore, when deadline is approaching there was always a member who turn into a sweatshop manager who drives things to happen just in time while any member who do not agree become a devil’s advocate to detect any groupthink defects. It was not a total harmony but at least things balanced.
• Conflict resolution: Distance brings difficulties to collaboration and our team is no exception. Take an analogy of a weather model combined with Thomas-Kilmann’s model of conflict management, I explained below three conflict cycles happened during the past two months.

1. We were first in a mist of fog when Chopsticks could not receive any email reply from Kite & Wind regarding how each side wanted to start our discussion. A shine of light came through the fog when the team representative of both sides got the phone line through, but immediately found the light was indeed a lightning followed by shocking noise when we found there was a big difference in interpreting the assignment requirements and the understanding of doing a business in Hong Kong. The hustle and bustle to find evidence supporting our own proposals was a thunderstorm, and later we realized lengthy email exchanges were very hard for members who have not yet established a common ground to be willing to digest at all. It was not drawing consensus but rather competing among ideas. Luckily a breakthrough came in when we could finally bring all six members together at one virtual location for a 2-sided Skype face-to-face project kick-off meeting, in a hope to “develop a shared understanding of the task at hand and begin to identify with the team” which process in return “will support the task collaboration during the project” (Siebdrat, Hoegl & Ernst, 2009). The sat-down was a natural environment for in-group members to glue individual proposals first before extending to the other side in a more concise way. It was a calm sunny day which within our one-hour time limit set we successfully agreed what collaborating industries to pick and divided labor.
2. The thick clouds gathered and blocked sunshine during the long Easter week when some members wanted to reserve time for a personal vacation back in their hometowns despite we all agreed that it should be the only term break that could allow a concentration of hard work. Some members were too confident that virtual meetings could still work regardless of location. We compromised and spent extra efforts in negotiating multiple time zones and reorganizing our workdays only to find in the end that for whatever technical and incidental reasons some members repeatedly failed to join the 6-camera Skype conferences and only sent out fragmented written inputs, avoiding taking the whole blame for a delayed progress. Lightning shocked rains out. Again, the antisocial context of low feedback and lengthy messages through email communication drew excessive attention to bad mood and perception of the problem’s magnitude which escalate the conflict (Johnson, 2002). Frustration and confusion accumulated which irreversibly dampened the team’s trust on specific members’ self-leadership and devotion to the team’s goal.
3. It is common that members who cannot catch up the progress eventually appeared to be free-riders. After all, we as a team yet had to keep a certain extent of cooperativeness in order to get the assignment done. Virtual Skype meetings still exist, expecting all members’ attendance. However, different reactions as concluded by a U21Global’s study of virtual teams of MBA students (Lam, Chua & Williams, 2005) were also found among the six of us. Some members demonstrated a calm clinical discussion manner in order not to get caught in the heat of discussion. They took a collaborative view of the asynchronous characteristics of virtual communication and contributed more time to mull over others’ messages to formulate appropriate responses for more thoughtful and substantive results. They were like warm sunshine. Other members accommodated free-riders with shallow discussions and requests in order not to further upset team harmony. They were like cooling breeze. All in all, instead of impersonal division of labor based on fairness, our virtual team was always trying to move things around for offering packaged deal of workload for overall comfort to everybody. We kept reminding ourselves the unchanged common goal of completing the team assignment under already time-pressured conditions.

How the Virtual Team Maintained the Process

• First encounter: Team goal setting is the first step before different members can set off to work in a convergent way. As mentioned above, our goal was apparent for a team with part-time classmates: Get the assignment done in a desired schedule. Started from our very first virtual meeting, we every time set a target time to wrap up our discussion. To achieve this, we in the very beginning drew a consensus the industry collaboration we proposed must have obvious feasibility and meaningfulness in order to drive and ease our study in the highest efficiency without holdback. Above-the-sky ideas were not preferred. Work-study balance is very important for part-time students so we expected members to utilize our virtual means for a well documentation of ideas and arguments which we can easily refer to at our own pace. We rely more on our work or personal email addresses for correspondence as any messages could come into our eyes immediately while we bought time to think and response.
• Members’ commitments: As I introduced myself to teammates and on the personal data form during the first lesson, I am a practical person gifted with logical side of thinking based on facts. I am also a natural presenter. Looking back the past few months, credits must be given to my teammates for indeed most of our primitive but creative ideas were blurt out from them, then natural taken up by me to analyze the feasibility and repackage the presentation to convince others as if my role was a product manager. Therefore, another commitment we made to each other is making effort to curb the rush to conclusions and allow time for thorough thoughts and free-flow discussions, just like what a company brainstorming session should aim to initiate.
• My concerns: The concern which I have not shared with the team is my observation of social loafing, which means people exert far less effort in groups than on their own, happening in our virtual team since individual contribution towards group blogging was hard to be identified (Williams, 2012). The situation worsen when the team’s trust was dampened and the sucker’s effect was induced, that active and capable members also reduced their level of efforts perceive that they are doing more than their fair share of the team's work as compared to others’ apparently free-riding behaviors. Team’s potential to excel was conceded to superficial harmony. I also alerted myself a possibility that the minimal interactions on a virtual platform exhibited by the apparently free-riders might be due to their unconfidence in writing skills or a preference to manage personal time for only essential communications. Therefore, I did not put this defame on any specific member. Rather, I shared with some trusted members about my view of learning how to manage diverse individual personalities and take control with style and grace. Being a certified administrator of Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®, I analyzed with them my prediction of our members’ personality types and how things can work out among different types of people with some behavioral changes without violating each other’s core values.
• Evaluation of success: I still believe that the virtual collaboration of Chopsticks and Kite & Wind was brilliant for our members are really smart. We generated great ideas of innovation which I truly think it doable in reality. We may not have emerged as a well-organized team who could spread our effort on the blog assignment evenly across the timeline we devised and stick with agreed milestones. The social loafing happened might be the cause of our dormant team behaviors of less proactiveness until deadline became imminent with an adoption of “get it over with” mentality (Lam, Chua & Williams, 2005). Our later interactions were mainly dividing the composition of blog into parts among members for later assembling, rather than debating and discussing about the problem at hand for we feared conflicts will happen again with no remaining time to resolve. Our members all have high ability individually, so when we finally sit down and concentrate to work, we still can produce acceptable outputs despite in a rush. However, the coherence and quality of the final blog might be compromised since things were just managed to be put together. Talking about if we have successfully produced a high quality product through the group assignment, deeper thoughts should be done by individual members whether or not he or she has absorbed in the educational insights into high performance collaboration that the assignment originally intended to offer.

Visual Facilitation at Connecting for Change 2009

References

Chen, C. C., Wu, J., Yang, S. C., & Tsou, H.-Y. (2008). Importance of Diversified Leadership Roles in  Improving Team Effectiveness in a Virtual Collaboration Learning Environment. Educational Technology & Society, 11(1), 304-321.

Effectiveness in a Virtual Collaboration Learning Environment. Educational Technology & Society, 11 (1), 304-321.

Hillmann, M. R., Dongier, P., Murgallis, R. P., Khosh, M., Allen, E. K., & Evernham, R. (2005). When Failure Isn't an Option. Harvard Business Review. 83(7/8): 41-50.

Johnson, L. K. (2002). Does E-mail Escalate Conflict? MIT Sloan Management Review. 44(1). 14-15.

Lam, W., Chua, A., & Williams, J. B. (2005). Real problems with virtual teams: an analysis of the factors leading to dysfunctional online collaboration. U21Global Working Paper. Retrieved May 7, 2013, from http://www.u21global.com/PartnerAdmin/ViewContent?module=DOCUMENTLIBRARY&oid=14098.

Siebdrat, F., Hoegl, M., & Ernst, H. (2009). How to Manage Virtual Teams. MIT Sloan Management Review. 50(4). 63-68.

Williams, R. B., (2012). How Teamwork Can Damage Productivity. Wired for Success. Retrieved May 7, 2013, from http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201203/how-teamwork-can-damage-productivity.