Project Managers Oversee Virtual Project Teams in Dissertation

Project Managers Oversee Virtual Project Teams in the Manufacturing Industry with Consideration for Effective Communication

The researcher has taken this matter ' How Can Project Managers Oversee Virtual Project Teams in the Manufacturing Industry with Consideration for Effective Communication' since the researcher has felt there was a growing demand in project management to address this concern.

Thanks to a rising global competition, today's companies are no longer limited by geographic location. Globalization drives a lot of companies into developing markets and low income nations so that they can take advantage of their intellectual capital, and minimize the cost of operation. A recent study by the Garner Group, states that by the year 2008, 41 million corporate employees will work in a virtual workplace at least one day per week [Wikipedia, www.wikipedia.com, "Virtual Teams"]. In this literature review we will look at the challenges of the virtual team communication in the manufacturing industry. Originally, we will see the communication issues that are connected with time, language barriers, and tine differences continually expanded by the lack of face-to-face knowledge and cultural differences. Then we will develop further to examine cultural value differences between virtual team members, different power relationships and hierarchical arrangements in the manufacturing arena, diverse communication designs in management and how are these improved in the virtual environments.

How Can Project Managers Oversee Virtual Project Teams in the Manufacturing Industry with Consideration for Effective Communication?

Literature Review

Research on virtual teams and management communication is basically still in infant stages (Badrinarayanan and Arnett, 2008, Prasad and Akhilesh, 2002) and because of the relative newness of virtual teams; a lot of areas of research have not been examined (Badrinarayanan and Arnett, 2008). Camarinha-Matos and Afsarmanesh (2003) state that, setting- up a framework for virtual team still needs a strong manufacturing result when it comes to communication, which signifies a crucial problem for the establishment of this new pattern. Efficient and effective collaboration across distributed and training teams becomes imperative for the accomplishment of projects that are engineering (Zhang et al., 2008). Consequently the experiments make a suggestion that more research should be done to explore the ways to improve the presentation of virtual teams through managing communication in the manufacturing industry (Chen, C., & Messner, J.,(2010).

Industries are currently dealing with significant and unique challenges in an ever active, continually complex and changing environment (Rezgui, 2007). Financial activity of all forms is moving in the way of globalization (Acs and Preston, 1997). Zhouying (2005) backs, the technological and financial gap between developing and developed countries can largely be clarified by the openings in the levels of soft technology and soft surroundings between the two sets of nations. As a result this issue should be taking into consideration. With the fast development of electronic info and communication means in the last decades, dispersed industry has become a lot simpler, faster and more productive (Hertel et al., 2005). Answering to the increasing globalization and de-centralization of work processes, a lot of organizations have replied to their dynamic environments by presenting virtual teams that join forces by communication technologies across temporal, geographical, cultural and organizational limits to accomplish common goal in their application outputs. Virtual teams are rising in respect (Siebdrat, F., Hoegl, M., & Ernst, H. 2009). Furthermore, the fast development of new communication technologies such as the internet has fast-tracked this section so that today, most of the greater organization services virtual teams to some amount (Wakefield, R., Leidner, D., & Garrison, G. 2008). Information technology is delivering the substructure necessary to support the growth of new organization procedures. Virtual teams designate one such organizational approach, one that could alter the workplace and transport organizations with unprecedented level of flexibility and responsiveness (Powell et al., 2004). Virtual teams are crucial mechanisms for organizations pursuing to determine scarce resources through geographic and other limitations (Munkvold and Zigurs, 2007). Now complex products are intended much more collaboratively with the dealers being implicated in the design procedure. The production of a new car for example includes multiple businesses in the supply chain performing more as partners in a joint manufacturing practice (Tseng, K., & Abdalla, H. 2006). Nevertheless by contrast in today's practical global economy, organizations that are capable of quickly making virtual teams of people that are talented and can respond quickly in a business environment that is changing. Abilities of this type present organizations a process of competitive advantage (Bergiel et al., 2008).Virtual teams represent wide selections of new product knowledge which appears to be an assuring source of invention. At current, except for software that is open source, there is not much on how to make use of the new product development (Fuller et al., 2006a).

However, the main part of this paper will talk about the findings from the literature survey in a number of parts. There are sections discussing what virtual team and management communication is examples, types, definitions, benefits and drawbacks.

What Is Virtual Team?

Virtual Teams: Origins and Trends:

Although work teams were utilized in the U.S. As early as the 1960s, the prevalent use of quality circles and teams began in the Total Quality Management crusade of the 1980s. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many businesses applied empowered self-managing or work teams. To cut paperwork, reduce cycle time, and advance service, employees that are line level took on problem-solving and decision-making responsibilities traditionally reserved for management. By the mid-1990s, growing rising numbers of companies such as Motorola, Goodyear, General Electric and Texas Instruments already started spreading the group aim to their foreign associates in Latin America Europe and Asia to integrate international human resource exercises (Kirkman et al., 2001). Now, due to the improvement of communication technology and sustained globalization, virtual teams have enlarged quickly international (Kirkman et al., 2002). This period is raising popularity for virtual team arrangements in organizations (Walvoord et al., 2008, Cascio, 2000). Martins (2004) in a chief review of the literature on virtual teams, settle that 'with rare exclusions all structural teams are virtual to some degree. Some experts believe that we have moved from working with people who are in our visual immediacy to functioning with individuals around the world (Johnson et al., 2001).

Definition of Virtual Team:

Literature related to virtual team's shows that there is a lack of complexity in the meanings. While virtual teamwork is a present topic in the literature on organizations that are global, it has been challenging to define what 'virtual' means across multiple institutional settings (Chudoba et al., 2005). The concept of a "team" is labeled as a small group of people with corresponding abilities who are similarly dedicated to a purpose that is common and working method for which they hold themselves equally responsible (Zenun et al., 2007). It is worth stating that virtual teams are often shaped to overcome temporal or geographical separations (Cascio and Shurygailo, 2003). Virtual teams work through limitations of time and space by exploiting contemporary computer-driven technologies. The term "virtual team" is expended to shelter a wide range of forms and activities of technology-supported working (Anderson et al., 2007). Virtual teams are contained of members who are positioned in more than one physical position. This team trait has nurtured widespread use of an assortment of methods of computer- arbitrated communication that allow geographically distributed associates to organize their separate inputs and efforts (Peters and Manz, 2007).

Gassmann and Von Zedtwitz (2003b) described "virtual team as a collection of persons and sub-teams who cooperate by interdependent jobs directed by common drive and work across relations supported by communication, information, and transport technologies. Another definition proposes that virtual teams are dispersed work teams whose members are geologically scattered and manage their work mainly with communication technologies and electronic information (e-mail, video-conferencing, telephone, etc.) (Hertelet al., 2005), diverse authors have identified different. From the viewpoint of Leenders et al. (2003) virtual teams are collections of persons cooperating in the implementation of an exact project while geographically and frequently temporally disseminated, perhaps anyplace within (and outside) their parent corporation. Lurey and Raisinghani (2001) described virtual teams - collections of persons who work together even though they are often distributed across time, space and/or organizational limitations. Amongst the different definitions of the concept of a virtual team the following from is one of the most widely accepted: (Powell et al., 2004), "we define virtual teams as groups of organizationally, geographically, and/or time detached workers put together by information technologies to achieve one or more group tasks'.

Types of Virtual Team:

Usually, we can distinguish numerous methods of "virtual" work varying on the amount of people concerned and the grade of communication among them. The first is "telework" (telecommuting) which is completed completely or partially outside of the chief corporation workplace with the help of telecommunication and information services." Virtual groups "happen when numerous teleworkers are united.....