VT MiniBook Chapter 7

In this chapter we examine both the traditional and the new methods of contact, connection and communication within a group. The chapter is filled with examples from companies and researchers meeting the challenge and helping others to meet their own.

Sun Microsystems jump-started its quality improvement process by chartering some 70 "SunTeams" in just one year that reached across the company's six operating companies. Virtual Teams are little glimpses of the future, experimental triads of people, organization and technology. Suddenly in the electronic era, people no longer must gather in physical places to "belong."

How people become members of general groups:

Identity: For the group to have its own unique sense of identity its physical location matters less than its "shared but secret information."
Socialization: orientation and training are formal processes of socialization, while hints, tips and suggestions convey crucial knowledge informally. People grow into groups over time.
Rank: the Electronic Age breaks down old ways to limit access as people can purchase a modem and join the Internet and enter into co-equal conversation or interaction with countless numbers of experts anywhere in the world.

As physical places give way to virtual ones, new members can instantly gain access to all of the group's information and do not have to desert old places in order to access new ones.

To be successful, virtual teams must construct virtual places:

Virtual Places: These are the new workspaces, allowing people to collaborate in new and original ways. For virtual teams, the web is becoming the place.

Privacy: virtual teams need privacy decision making and negotiating tasks. It is easy to design digital places that combine public and private areas, most simply through passwords and access lists.

Virtual Team Technology: The model for network technology--Nodes, Links, and Applications--overlaps and compliments the development of the virtual teams model--People, Links and Purpose.

New Rules: Digitize early and often. Start your results in digital form and keep them digital as long as possible.