Submitted by: Submitted by zolivia
Views: 100
Words: 931
Pages: 4
Category: Business and Industry
Date Submitted: 07/08/2014 06:06 PM
This article, entitled, Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger? by Ann Majchrzak, Arvind Malhotra, Jeffrey Stamps and Jessica Lipnack discusses the strengths of a virtual team and the necessary elements needed to achieve a successful virtual team.
Bob Carmen, at Rocketdyne was able to design a reusable rocket engine, called SLICE, in only one-tenth the amount of time it took to develop its predecessors even though the only physically meeting the team had included five of the members and the members only spent about fifteen percent of each work week over ten months. Carmen was able to pull this off by “using modern communications technology to fashion a virtual, far-flung team of diverse talents that no face-to-face team could match.” (275) Through this team and its success, three principles were established that should guide most teams. The first has to do with how these teams were composed, the second has to do with how they used technology to coordinate their efforts and finally, the third is how team leaders encouraged a group of strangers that have little in common to functions as a fully supportive group.
The first rule to a successfully virtual team is to exploit diversity. Carmen chose people for his project based on the strength of their differences. These people and their disciplines were so different and each subgroup had a distinct style of working and different approach to solving problems. Each team member had “areas of competence that were uniquely his or her own, and inevitably, disagreements arose over matters within one person’s area of expertise that had repercussions for other team members. But the clash of perspectives produced solutions instead of acrimony.” (276) Much of these solutions were determined during conference calls, in which all members engaged in conversations and discussed different alternatives. By encouraging everyone to talk and by the necessity of being a virtual team needing everyone to contribute, the level of attention...