A rapidly growing trend in the business world is the growth of virtual teams.  Some companies are allowing teleworking, which means that more and more workers have to coordinate their activities with other team members through the phone or internet.  Even among workers who are working from their office, more and more companies are having employees work in teams with employees who work at other locations who they may or may not have ever met in person.  New technologies have been developed to help facilitate virtual teamwork, but challenges still remain.

Review the background materials and also do some research on virtual teams.  Here are a few articles on virtual teams to get you started:

Garfoot, A. (2003, 05). The reality of virtual teams. IT Training,. 32-34. [Proquest]

Sadri, G., & Condia, J. (2012). Managing the virtual world. Industrial Management, 54(1), 21-25. [Proquest]

Rigby, R. (2013). How best to manage a virtual team. The Financial Times [Proquest]

When you are finished with your research, integrate what you learned in general about group dynamics in the background materials with more specific information you learned about virtual teams.  Write a four to five page paper addressing the following issues:

1. How do you think the five stages of group development  (forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning) will be different for virtual teams as compared to traditional teams?  Discuss in regard to all five stages of group development as covered in Nair (2010) and Aswathappa (2010).
2. Do you think virtual teams will be more or less cohesive than traditional teams?  Include a discussion of the issue of groupthink in your discussion, and use Nair (2010) and Aswathappa (2010) as your guide to the concepts of group cohesiveness and groupthink.
3. Overall, do you think virtual teams will perform better or worse than traditional teams?  Explain your answer with references to the background readings.

Assignment Expectations

• Answer the assignment questions directly
• Stay focused on the precise assignment questions, don’t go off on tangents or devote a lot of space to summarizing general background materials
• Make sure to use reliable and credible sources as your references. Articles published in established newspapers or business journals/magazines are preferred.  If you find articles on the internet, make sure it is from a credible source.
• Reference your sources of information with both a bibliography and in-text citations. See the Student Guide to Writing a High-Quality Academic Paper, including pages 13-14 on in-text citations. Another resource is the “Writing Style Guide”, which is found under “My Resources” in the TLC portal.

• Module 3 – SLP

  GROUPS AND TEAMS

  Assignment Instructions

  For the Module 3 SLP, pick an experience in your workplace when you were assigned to work as part of a team.  Think carefully about your experiences working on this team, and how the concepts in the background materials apply to your experiences.  Then write a two to three page paper addressing the following issues:

  1. Did Tuckman’s five stages of group development apply to your team? Did some of the stages apply but not others? Explain your reasoning with specific experiences that your team faced and references to at least one of the required textbook chapters from the background materials.
  2. How would you rate the cohesiveness of your team?  Was it not very cohesive, or was it too cohesive to the extent that your team suffered from groupthink? Explain your reasoning with specific experiences that your team faced and references to at least one of the required textbook chapters from the background materials.
  3. Based on what you’ve read in the background materials, what do you think could have been done differently with this team to improve its performance?

  SLP Assignment Expectations

  • Answer the assignment questions directly
  • Stay focused on the precise assignment questions, don’t go off on tangents or devote a lot of space to summarizing general background materials
  • Make sure to use reliable and credible sources as your references. Articles published in established newspapers or business journals/magazines are preferred.  If you find articles on the internet, make sure it is from a credible source.
  • Reference your sources of information with both a bibliography and in-text citations. See the Student Guide to Writing a High-Quality Academic Paper, including pages 13-14 on in-text citations. Another resource is the “Writing Style Guide”, which is found under “My Resources” in the TLC portal.