Our fourth and final formal team structure concept that I want to share with you and talk about, is what we call Team Virtuality. Now we know, and you're likely already working in teams that are highly virtual, people are spread out, at least across technology if not completely around the globe in a lot of cases these days. We've started studying again over the last 10-15 years as technology has really enabled these virtual teams to begin working together. We've started to try and understand what's the impact of that virtual nature of teamwork on team success, and how can you as a leader, really ensure that your team, regardless of how virtual it may or may not be, can drive success in that team? So the concept again, the fourth and final formal team structure Team Virtuality. The concept is simply the degree to which your team is dispersed geographically or nationally, and or communicates via technology. And there's a reason that I differentiate between those. Your team could all be located in the same city, but communicate almost exclusively via technology largely having the same effect if even you were spread across the globe. And so it's not just whether you're located geographically close together or not, it's also about how you communicate. And if the communication is primarily through technology, then you are a more virtual operating team, and so you want to think about both the pattern of communication, as well as the geographic or nationality dispersion that's in your team when assessing do I have a team that is more or less virtual. Now we've been doing a lot of research on the impact of virtuality on team performance which I'm sad to say, but maybe not too surprising for you, on average we find that virtuality hurts team performance. But there are some things that we've learned that enable you to perform better in virtual teams, that I want to share with you. So the effect of virtuality on team performance. Again, are we talking geographic, national, or what we call electronic dependence. What we find, is that geographic dispersion, on average, and here I'm looking at innovation and creativity in teams. We can certainly look at efficiency and performance from that aspect as well but here I'm focusing on innovation. The effect of geographic dispersion. So, I'm in the U.S. you're in India. Another person is in China. Another person is in Europe. Another person is in South America. We've got huge geographic dispersion. What we find is that geographic dispersion reduces what we call contextual knowledge. This is the knowledge that I have about the U.S., you have about India. Other person by China and it reduces my knowledge of your context and vise versa makes it harder for us to share that contextual knowledge. It also may be obvious increases. The coordination cause and the coordination complexity of us trying to work together. So what we find is a key success factor there is to make sure that were consistently fostering the exchange of that contextual knowledge and then having pre clear coordination plans as well. On the national dispersion, which again is not necessarily the same as geographic dispersion, we often find that because we're from different nationalities we have different values. We have different communication preferences in some cases. Those differences in preferences, those differences in values can often affect our identification with the team. And so I may identify quite strongly with this team, you may identify weaker with the team. Or we may identify weak with the team overall because we identify more strongly with our home office, or something of that sort. So it can reduce that identification with the team, which is really about commitment to the team. So then what do you do? Well as a manager one thing you want to think about is how do I bridge in group and out group members? If some people are co-located for example or they are all from the same nationality, often times they will form what we call an in group. And then there other members that are left on the periphery, the out group members. So as leader you wanna think carefully about how you manage the in group and the out group such that there are bridges between those divides. The other thing you wanna think about doing is understanding the preferences. In particular communication preferences for all of your different team members. And coming to some common or shared understanding of those preferences while still enabling the individuals to be unique. They're from different national backgrounds and origins, and we're never going to be the same. And so you want to preserve that uniqueness while making sure that you're bringing those preferences together. In some shared understanding of each other and how we're gonna work together. So if your element of virtuality is mostly national culture based, these are some best practices that you can use, that are somewhat different than if your element of virtuality is mostly geographic in nature. Again, all of us could be from the U.S., or all of us could be from India, all of us could be from China, but we could be dispersed geographically in really intense ways. We all share the same national origin or background, but because of that geographic dispersion, we're still quite virtual. And then the other is, and here we could be in the exact same office, we could be in the same office location, but our communication is largely driven through electronic means and so our electronic dependence is quite high. So the effect on innovation, it reduces the ability to control and monitor what people are doing because you can't see them. They're communicating to you through electronic means. And so you're unable to be present, physically co-located, reduces that ability to monitor as a leader. It also reduces the clarity and richness of your communications. Email, texting, those sorts of communications though efficient, often reduce the richness of communication. They often create opportunities for misunderstanding. And so you have to be very careful about being too overly dependent on electronic communication. Things you can do to help drive that. If you have the opportunity for face-to-face communication, mixing face-to-face with electronic communication can be quite effective. Increasing the feedback giving and seeking opportunities where you really promote a culture of reaching out to other people for feedback, and then people being willing to give that feedback can help break down some of those barriers that might exist through electronic dependence. And then developing clear social cues, and clear norms for how you're gonna communicate electronically. When they're upset are they going to use the all caps feature, for example in an email. Probably not an effective way to express your frustration or your angst. Probably better to do that face to face or pick up the phone. And so there's certain norms that you can create for your team. That it will enable you to communicate through electronic means more effectively and know when to not depend on electronic communication. So these are some best practices, some effects that we've learned that can really get in to a way of team performance and then some of those key success factors and best practices that you as the team leader or even a team member can use to really help get the most out of your virtual team. In addition to those, we've been doing some studies that have highlighted three different strategies that will help you enable these key success factors to become a reality in your team. So I'm gonna share each one of those with you. With some of the data to illustrate just how powerful these three strategies are for your team's performance. The first one is as team leader, the ability to foster an empowered, decentralized culture within your team. So for example, this study by a colleague of mine, Brad Kirkman. I think is fascinating. He had teams that were highly face-to-face co-located, working together face-to-face, really intensely. And then other teams that were almost exclusively virtual, low face-to-face interaction. If you're operating face-to-face, the climate frame powerment, how empowered those team members are, didn't really matter as much, didn't really have a strong effect on team performance. But If you're in a virtual setting, if your team feels highly empowered to make decisions, to determine how it's gonna work together, then you get some positive performance benefits, maybe even better than face to face in some cases. However, if you're operating in that virtual environment and your team does not feel empowered, look at the negative impact relative to the other teams on performance. Low empowerment combined with low face to face interaction is your worst nightmare, a disaster for your team's performance. So if your team is virtual with low face-to-face interaction. One of the things as team leader that you have to focus on is empowering that team. If you don't, you'll suffer the negative consequences in terms of performance. That's strategy one. Virtual team, emphasize, reinforce empowerment. The second strategy that you want to focus on is building what we call support structures. So again, here you have team performance on the Y axis and you have what we call low virtuality, high virtuality. So low virtuality would mean lots of face to face interaction. High virtuality would mean less face to face interaction. And then we had teams where they had low structural support, high structural support. So what do I mean by structural support, good examples clear and fair reward structures, clear task structures, clear roles, consistent and reinforcing communication and information sharing. These are examples of what we've studied as support structures. That can support a team even when they are highly virtual to still be effective. So if you look at these data, what you find is that when we have lots of face-to-face interaction, we can get away with unclear roles, inconsistent information sharing, even unclear reward structures. Probably not for the long-term, but we can at least get with some of that. But if our team is highly virtual very little face-to-face interaction. You have to focus on building in some of these support structures. Because you wanna use these support structures, like the reward structures, like the task structures, to make sure that everybody is clear in terms of roles, responsibilities, timelines, milestones, and that the reward structures are guiding the appropriate behavior. Because if you're not face to face, you can't monitor, you can't control it, you can't see it. And so you've gotta create these support structures that are gonna be in place to guide your team members behavior. Because you're not gonna be there to do it. And that's the value of these support structures. And that's strategy two. High virtuality, low face to face interaction. You wanna drive empowerment, strategy one. Strategy two, drive and build those structural support systems: reward structures, tasks, role structures, and information sharing and communication. Then strategy three, you have to build what we call a safe environment for people to speak up. In teams, where you have, in this case we studied geographic dispersion. So low geographic dispersion would mean that we're all collocated in the same geography. High geographic dispersion would mean that some of us are in one country or one state, others are in a different office environment. We are completely dispersed in terms of different geographies. Okay. That's high geographic dispersion. What you see here. Is just how important building a safe, what we call climate. Safe environment. We call it psychological safety. This again is something that Max will talk with you at length about. When we talk about team dynamics and team process the importance of the safe culture, the safe climate within the team. Where people feel like they can disagree, they can speak up, they can speak their mind. We're finding that in highly virtual teams, especially when we're geographically dispersed, if you do not build this safe climate where people feel like they can speak up and challenge each other. Your team performance suffers dramatically that safe environment is really important. No matter what your geographic dispersion is, no matter how virtual you are, but especially when you are in a virtual team environment. So if you are distributed geographically. It's absolutely essential that you build a psychologically safe environment in your team.
