7.2 Introduction

Without doubt, VITeams are becoming ever more commonplace and crucial for a whole host of business activities. These range from the development of a new product, to the provision of services and creative collaboration. Employing VITeams involves sourcing talent and expertise from around the world for a specific task and offers new opportunities for collaborative task completion. Today's almost universally accessible technology allows VITeams to bring together culturally diverse groups of individuals in order to enhance organisational performance, creativity and innovation. The interview clips that follow highlight some of the major benefits of VITeams:

 

Because VITeams have access to rich resources, combining practices, knowledge and experience, they are increasingly being called upon to leverage these resources in order to enhance performance. However, simply assembling teams does not necessarily translate into a high level of efficiency, as diversity not only functions as an enabler but can also function as a barrier to performance. One argument put forward in this session will be that VITeams simply need to be treated differently from face-to-face teams. This means that a team needs to evaluate which work processes work best for them and how to meet their own particular challenges. These could be, for example, temporal and geographical dispersion or the lingua franca used. A second area for consideration is that in order to benefit from the diversity of teams, team members need to leverage different work processes and thus negotiate an E-culture for their team. The assumption here is that a strong E-culture geared to meeting the needs of the VITeam will support the development of a strong and healthy team identity. In this way we can benefit from the diversity of its members as an enabler for team effectiveness and satisfaction. A third argument is that an E-culture can be expressly and deliberately developed and cultivated.

Session 5 already made a start in this direction when discussing the mutuality that can be created by employing the MBI approach. This laid the groundwork for the understanding that outlining differences and commonalities is a first step towards integrating differences. Bridging enabled the transition from this initial understanding to the successful integration of differences. Session 05 also provided a framework for developing an identity profile which can be used in the application of the MBI approach. In addition, session 06 (Challenges of VITeams) generated an awareness of areas particularly worthy of consideration and focus. What is missing is a more detailed practical perspective of how integration can actually be put to creative use. The focus of this session, therefore, is the introduction of tools and processes, which aid the leveraging and integration of different resources, with the aim of creating a synergetic E-culture.