PMGM7002 Chap.8 Global Team Processes, Conflict and Virtual Teams
Global Team Processes, Conflict and Virtual Teams
Processes that alternate over time
Teamwork processes fall into transition processes, such as analysing the mission and setting goals, action processes, such as monitoring and coordinating, and interpersonal processes, such as managing emotion and conflict, which run throughout.
Global teams often cut the transition conversations first because meetings across time zones are costly, and lose direction as a result.
What executives say, and what top teams do
The course presents a survey in which 58 senior executives rated tasks for global team effectiveness on importance and difficulty, each from 1 to 7. Cultivating trust was rated most important at 6.52 and most difficult at 6.06, with overcoming communication barriers close behind.
Top-performing teams share three conflict habits: attend to content rather than style, discuss the reasons for decisions, and assign work by expertise.
Four strategies for team problems
For problems arising from different decision norms, communication styles, status and loss of face, the course sets out adaptation, structural intervention, managerial intervention and exit, each with the conditions that favour it and the factors that complicate it.
The chapter treats the list as an escalation, since each later strategy costs more.
Development, emergent states and virtual work
Cohesion, potency and transactive memory emerge as members work together. Teams develop through forming, storming, norming and performing, or, in the punctuated equilibrium view, change approach at the midpoint of their available time.
Virtual teams trade lower travel costs and wider talent pools for isolation, weaker trust and harder performance assessment, and recent remote work findings on working time, personality and tie strength complete the evidence.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Transition, action and interpersonal processes
- 02
The executive survey on importance and difficulty
- 03
Conflict habits of top-performing teams
- 04
Four strategies from adaptation to exit
- 05
Cohesion, potency and transactive memory
- 06
Four-stage development and punctuated equilibrium
- 07
Advantages and challenges of virtual teams
- 08
Remote work findings
Worked example · free
Restart a dispersed team that has gone quiet
- 2Link the symptoms to the survey evidence and virtual team challenges.
- 3Choose a strategy for each subgroup and justify it.
- 2Time the intervention using a development model.
Key terms
- Transition Processes
- Teamwork activities between bouts of work, such as analysing the mission, formulating strategy and specifying goals.
- Action Processes
- Teamwork activities during the work, such as monitoring progress, coordinating efforts and helping one another.
- Team Potency
- The shared confidence of members that their team will succeed whatever situation or task it faces.
- Transactive Memory
- How specialised knowledge is distributed among members so the team functions as a system that knows who knows what.
- Punctuated Equilibrium
- A development model in which a team works in one mode until the midpoint of its available time, then shifts to a second mode.
- Virtual Team
- A group whose members depend on each other and pursue a common aim across distance, time zones and organisational boundaries using technology.
- Structural Intervention
- Managing a team problem by reorganising the team, for example by subdividing it to mix cultures or expertise.
Global Team Processes, Conflict and Virtual Teams FAQ
What matters most for a global team to be effective?
In the survey of 58 senior executives presented in the course, cultivating trust among members was rated the most important task, at 6.52 on a 7-point scale, followed by overcoming communication barriers. Trust was also rated the most difficult. Clarity about team objectives scored high on importance but much lower on difficulty, so it is the quickest gain.
How do top-performing teams handle conflict?
The course reports three shared tendencies. They focus on the content of what a member says rather than the style in which it is delivered, they discuss explicitly the reasons behind team decisions, and they assign work to people with relevant expertise instead of relying on volunteering, default or convenience.
Is working remotely better or worse for teams?
The course presents mixed evidence. Virtual teams reduce travel and widen the talent pool, but members can feel isolated and trust develops more slowly. Studies it cites found working time 10 to 20 per cent longer, and communication rising with strong ties while falling with weak ones, so remote teams must deliberately build the new relationships they would once have formed by chance.
Assessment move
Memorise the top two rows of the executive survey and the four strategies in escalation order. Then, for any team problem in a case, write one line saying which strategy fits and which enabling condition makes it fit. That line is often the core of a strong recommendation paragraph.
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