To conclude my 3-year virtual team experience, I would like to tell you that it is really easy to establish but hard to manage. It is all about personal relationship and trust.
Giddens (1990: 34) defines trust as "confidence in the reality of a person or system, regarding a given set of outcomes or events …" Although this definition is still not universally accepted by scholars, I do agree with it.
In 2005, my company decided to set up a Joint Venture with a Malaysia based company and entered a fast-moving ecommerce industry. The venture capital was around 200M HK dollars. With the formation of this company, we have teams widely distributed throughout Asia, including HK, KL, TW, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Macua, Beijing, Dailian, Chengdu.
Taking an agile and prompt approach, the new JV deliberately just set up a company hierarchy structure and left all the other teams in virtual team. Both side agreed to contribute all their resources wherever/whenever any request were made from virtual teams.
The new JV then operated in virtual mode. For top management, we spent around 1 million to set up a dedicated video conference line between Hong Kong and Malaysia and agreed to meet virtually twice a month. To make progress, we set up project group to implement all orders from top management. For lower level working teams, like IT team, they pooled their all software and hardware elites to form a group and try to establish a groundbreaking system to reshuffle the market. Market know-how and technical know-how were required to be transferred from Malaysia team to China team.
The whole project was in a state of chaos three months later. IT virtual group members found themselves totally not in sync either technically or personally (even though they are all Chinese). From the technical aspect, their skill set differences were huge where some were .NET experts, some were Java-based, and Malaysia team knew PHP/MySQL/AJAX only. Some of the China team even felt as if they never joined the new JV since they were still paid by the original company and reported to the original boss daily. They never listened to the virtual team leader from other side. On the other hand, the Malaysian team was reluctant to transfer their know-how.
For the top management team, the project team could not make any progress. Key persons were often missed in video conferences. Even the CEO, from Malaysia side, sometimes hid himself behind the screen while having video conference. (We learnt the reason later on. The CEO found himself in a difficult situation since the order from his boss was not in line with JV direction.)
We then spent almost a year to build up personal trust relationship among the top management team by irregular face-to-face beer gatherings and sent key guys physically to lead the China team (of course, invoked power struggle). Eventually, the project started kicking off.
I won't go further with my case. All I want to point out is no matter the trust is based on abstract systems or persons it would probably take you a long period for (virtual) team integration. Mind your own schedule!
Here, I would like to share the model advocated by Nandakumar and Baskerville 2001 on operation of trust relationships on the internet-mediated virtual teamworking. It really may help you if you are building a virtual team. (please click to get a larger photo)
