Building an Ethical Small Group (Chapter 9 of Meeting the Ethical Challenges of Leadership)

This chapter examines ethical leadership in the small-group context. To help create groups that brighten rather than darken the lives of participants, leaders must foster individual ethical accountability among group members, ensure ethical group interaction, avoid moral pitfalls, and establish ethical relationships with other groups. In his metaphor of the leader\u27s light or shadow, Parker Palmer emphasizes that leaders shape the settings or contexts around them. According to Palmer, leaders are people who have an unusual degree of power to create the conditions under which other people must live and move and have their being, conditions that can either be as illuminating as heaven or as shadowy as hell. 1 In this final section of the text, I\u27ll describe some of the ways we can create conditions that illuminate the lives of followers in small-group, organizational, global, and crisis settings. Shedding light means both resisting and exerting influence. We must fend off pressures to engage in unethical behavior while actively seeking to create healthier moral environments

Impacts of team virtuality on performance : a qualitative study.

Recent studies on virtual teams reveal that team virtuality varies in a continuum and may take different levels. Different levels of virtuality have considerable impacts on team processes and management as they imply several characteristics concerning communication dynamics and interaction styles, which change when shifting from one level to another. The purpose of this paper is to assess how the variability of team virtuality influences team performance. A multidimensional approach to evaluate virtuality was elaborated to identify changing performance variables at each level. The performance variables retained with relevance to the context study are: output quality, team members` satisfaction, and team processes. A qualitative study was conducted on 6 virtual teams composed of 4 students involved in on-line master degrees at a French university. The results show that performance measures are differently influenced by virtuality level. Although output quality seems not to be related to team virtuality, effective team processes and members’ satisfaction are associated with low virtuality levels. Ineffective processes were found in high virtuality teams, however positive dynamics and tem spirit characterise low virtuality teams.Télétravail; Virtual team performance; Team processes; performance; Equipes virtuelles; E-management; Telework;

A Typology of Virtual Teams: Implications for Effective Leadership

As the nature of work in today\u27s organizations becomes more complex, dynamic, and global, there has been an increasing emphasis on far-flung, distributed, virtual teams as organizing units of work. Despite their growing prevalence, relatively little is known about this new form of work unit. The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical framework to focus research toward understanding virtual teams and, in particular, to identify implications for effective leadership. Specifically, we focus on delineating the dimensions of a typology to characterize different types of virtual teams. First, we distinguish virtual teams from conventional teams to identify where current knowledge applies and new research needs to be developed. Second, we distinguish among different types of virtual teams, considering the critical role of task complexity in determining the underlying characteristics of virtual teams and leadership challenges the different types entail. Propositions addressing leadership implications for the effective management of virtual teams are proposed and discussed

Virtual Teams: Work/Life Challenges - Keeping Remote Employees Engaged

Remotely located employees are quickly becoming a norm in the modern workplace in response to evidence that telecommuters save on costs and produce more efficiently. There are many intangible benefits also felt with the increasing prevalence of remote employees. Telecommuters are more satisfied with their work/life balance and report lower rates of job burnout. Though there are also many well-identified setbacks remotely located managers and employees may face. Employers see the most success with telecommuting by first recruiting the people best fit to fill these remote roles. However, the process of developing remote employees is a process that requires constant monitoring. The purpose of this paper is to identify the best practices being used by companies to keep remote employees engaged while simultaneously avoiding burnout

Cultural diversity and information and communication technology impacts on global virtual teams: An exploratory study.

Modern organizations face many significant challenges because of turbulent environments and a competitive global economy. Among these challenges are the use of information and communication technology (ICT), a multicultural workforce, and organizational designs that involve global virtual teams. Ad hoc teams create both opportunities and challenges for organizations and many organizations are trying to understand how the virtual environment affects team effectiveness. Our exploratory study focused on the effects of cultural diversity and ICT on team effectiveness. Interviews with 41 team members from nine countries employed by a Fortune 500 corporation were analyzed. Results suggested that cultural diversity had a positive influence on decision‐making and a negative influence on communication. ICT mitigated the negative impact on intercultural communication and supported the positive impact on decision making. Effective technologies for intercultural communication included e‐mail, teleconferencing combined with e‐Meetings, and team rooms. Cultural diversity influenced selection of the communication media

Enhancing project-related behavioral competence in education

The workforce has increasingly been demanding an educational model that produces students experienced in real project management (PM) practices. This includes producing technically competent students--one who can manage real-world project constraints of cost and schedule but also possess critical project related behavioral competence. Such soft skills are essential if a project is to run smoothly and eventually succeed. In this paper, we describe an educational framework grounded in outcomes based education to enhance project-related behavioral competence. Instructors can leverage this framework to augment their existing courses and develop the critical career skill sets of graduating students

Team Learning: A Theoretical Integration and Review

With the increasing emphasis on work teams as the primary architecture of organizational structure, scholars have begun to focus attention on team learning, the processes that support it, and the important outcomes that depend on it. Although the literature addressing learning in teams is broad, it is also messy and fraught with conceptual confusion. This chapter presents a theoretical integration and review. The goal is to organize theory and research on team learning, identify actionable frameworks and findings, and emphasize promising targets for future research. We emphasize three theoretical foci in our examination of team learning, treating it as multilevel (individual and team, not individual or team), dynamic (iterative and progressive; a process not an outcome), and emergent (outcomes of team learning can manifest in different ways over time). The integrative theoretical heuristic distinguishes team learning process theories, supporting emergent states, team knowledge representations, and respective influences on team performance and effectiveness. Promising directions for theory development and research are discussed

FACTORS INFLUENCING PROJECT TEAM EFFECTIVENESS AS PERCEIVED BY PROJECT MANAGERS IN MALAYSIA – A PILOT STUDY

As more project teams are formed to help Malaysian organizations in achieving their objectives that individual efforts cannot achieve, there is a compelling reason to understand the critical factors that can influence project team effectiveness, because the effectiveness outcome can yield benefits to organizations. This study developed a research model underpinned on Cohen & Bailey’s (1997) Team Effectiveness Framework to empirically analyze some critical factors that influence project team effectiveness. Results show that project manager’s leadership roles are not directly influencing project team effectiveness, but they are directly influencing both team building & participation, and team shared mental models in which these two factors are directly and positively influencing project team effectivenessProject Team Effectiveness, Leadership Roles, Team Building & Participation, Team Shared Mental Models, Project Manager

Distributed Leadership: A Review of Literature

A review of empirical research studies of distributed leadership from public and private sector settings completed since 1995

Virtual EQ – the talent differentiator in 2020?

In an increasingly competitive, globalised world, knowledge-intensive industries/ services are seen as engines for success. Key to this marketplace is a growing army of ‘talent’ i.e. skilled and dedicated knowledge workers. These knowledge workers engage in non-routine problem solving through combining convergent, divergent and creative thinking across organizational and company boundaries - a process often facilitated though the internet and social media, consequently forming networks of expertise. For knowledge workers, sharing their learning with others through communities of practice embedded in new information media becomes an important element of their personal identity and the creation of their individual brand or e-social reputation. Part of the new knowledge/skills needed for this process becomes not only emotional intelligence (being attuned to the emotional needs of others) but being able to do this within and through new media, thus the emergence of virtual emotional intelligence (EQ). Our views of current research found that HRD practitioners in 2020 might need to consider Virtual EQ as part of their talent portfolio. However it seems that new technology has created strategies for capturing and managing knowledge that are readily duplicated and that a talent differentiator in 2020 might simply be the ability and willingness to learn