Three Characteristics Of Collaboration. Five Boundaries that may Impede Virtual Team Effectiveness.

August 16, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Business Skill - Team Management 

THREE CHARACTERISTICS OF COLLABORATION
Before discussing this framework specific to virtual teams, it is important to examine the nature of collaboration in general and provide a rationale for investing in it. Collaboration, as formally defined, has three main characteristics. Katzenbach and Smith (1993) in their popular book, The Wisdom of Teams, provided six necessary ingredients to effective teamwork, including urgency of purpose and shared goals. By extension, collaboration (an operationalization of the popular understanding of teamwork ushered into our consciousness by Katzenbach and Smith and others) occurs when individuals work together toward a shared goal, completing the work is dependent on relationships with a purpose, and individuals working together in purposeful ways toward a shared goal are committed to one another’s success.
Achieving each of these characteristics of collaboration takes sustained commitment on the part of team members.

First, ownership of shared goals does not happen without intentional and effortful communication among members. In other words, absence of or lukewarm efforts toward mutual understanding for whatever reasons may leave members grappling individually with different work goals and, as a result, experiencing loss of that concerted power to act that comes with consensus decision making and a shared and energizing vision of what can be achieved. Instead team members may unwittingly find themselves with competing frames of reference, differing purposes, confusion about what needs to be done and how it can best be accomplished, interpersonal misunderstandings, and ultimately performance decrements that belie why they came together in the first place.

Thus, there is a clear business case for doing the hard work of communicating from the outset in order to reach shared understanding and agreement on process and outcome goals, as well as strategies and tactics for accomplishing them before getting too mired in the work of the team.
In a somewhat different vein, in the mid- to late twentieth century, before widespread engagement in virtual teaming, work in teams (or groups, as they were called then) often focused on leveraging social relationships among members as a success factor rather than simply attending to the stated purposes of the work (that is, the task case for working together). Paying attention to group dynamics in addition to performance targets, without the advantage of the rich body of knowledge on team effectiveness available today, tended to dilute team efforts toward product quality (team success) rather than strengthen them. However, by definition, relationships with a purpose in team settings refers to members who are highly committed to working together to achieve outcomes they believe they cannot achieve alone. This idea, of course, goes back to the cave dwellers, and it can be argued in numerous epochs and echelons since then that there is tangible value in this belief because it promotes survival and in team settings contributes to cohesion (that is, “we are all in this together and for a good reason”) and thus momentum toward purposeful, collaborative (and, ideally, financially rewarding) action.
Third, a by-product of working together for a shared purpose is often a commitment to one another’s success rather than a singular focus on taking care of oneself at the expense of others—the latter a sure-fire formula for poor team performance. Commitment to others’ success tends to be a function not only of familiarity (that is, time spent on task and in informal gatherings outside work, which tend to break down cultural barriers and increase interpersonal comfort levels, but also of awareness among team members that “another’s success is my success,” captured in the now somewhat trite TEAM acronym found on posters: “Together We Achieve More.” Taken together, these three characteristics of collaboration send the message that no on can go it alone, as in traditional Western approaches to work and life; rather, one’s success (or lack thereof) is intimately tied to the efforts of one’s fellow teammates and perhaps soberly captured by the notion from the midcentury European Gestalt tradition that we perceive the whole as different from the sum of its parts. We would prefer to say greater as the phrase has been restated in popular lore in that, indeed, collaborative efforts represent a significant investment of time and energy and should therefore pay significant dividends, but this is not always the case.
Furthermore, in virtual team settings, distance complicates the equation with cultural differences and other constraints that potentially separate members, making the investment of all members all the more critical.

CROSSING BOUNDARIES
Attempting collaborative work arrangements in today’s world is an incredibly complex and challenging endeavor. Team members are often distributed across company sites around the globe. The geographical spread of facilities and people brings with it enormous diversity, cultural and otherwise, including a host of different perspectives, languages, goals, doctrines for getting the work done (“this is how we do things around here”), trade and governmental sanctions, permitting venues, management styles, natural resource and supply chain infrastructures, legal channels to effective business practice, attitudes toward worker board participation, and many other potentially divisive features, including perhaps too frequent political upheavals and terrorist acts in host countries. Virtual teams may have the advantage of avoiding the ground skirmishes, but nonetheless, like their brick-and-mortar cohorts, face many of the same challenges at a relentless twenty-four-hour-workday pace.

Taking an organizational perspective, Mankin and Cohen (2004) have captured the complexity of these contexts for doing business collaboratively with six continua:
From                            To
Simple                         Complex problems
Well defined             High task uncertainty
Two people              Multiple people
Lots in common    Diverse perspectives
Common goals       Different goals
Face-to-face           Virtual

On a more practical note, members of virtual teams can benefit by identifying the boundaries that may limit their progress toward successful boundary crossings. The following boundary conditions may impede the attempts of virtual team members to collaborate on projects:

Individual Boundaries
•    Gender
•    Age
•    Discipline
•    Identity (who are we?)
•    Ethnic background
•    Personal (differing tastes or preferences)
•    Native language
•    Preverbal (unable to articulate hunches)
•    Theoretical framework
•    Ethical
•    Historical (differing experience with virtual teams)
•    Individual (assumptions, values, biases, goals, styles, and so on)

Technical Boundaries
•    Differing technological systems (such as differing computer systems)
•    Technical language

Spatial/Geographic/Environmental Boundaries
•    Time (different time zones)
•    Geography (distance, political environment)
•    Country (such as restrictions in sharing technical knowledge with defense implications)
•    Economic
•    Culture (differing country value systems)

Task-related Boundaries
•    Task (different understanding of what is to be done)
•    Skills (consider differing skill levels)
•    Project (such as assignment to multiple projects that compete for one’s time)
•    Resources (for example, some members have plentiful and some have scarce support and resources)

Organizational Boundaries
•    Culture (differing company value systems)
•    Departmental (differing local politics)
•    Company (restrictions in sharing proprietary knowledge)
•    Control or authority (who is leading what?)
•    Hierarchical (status differences)
•    Institutional (competitors, regulators, supply chain)
•    Political (whom do I trust?), organizational (vertical and horizontal)

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