The Problems of Team Building in Global Companies

THE PROBLEMS OF TEAM BUILDING IN GLOBAL COMPANIES

Abstract

Recently, globalization had increased the challenges of team building. It is because more and more companies are tend to focus on team from global world. The purpose of this paper explored the problems and challenges of team building in a global setting. Major challenges include challenge on building and maintaining trust and collaboration, communication barriers, difficult to monitor and evaluate team, poor performance and technology problems. Besides, this paper will discuss how the above problems are matter for team building in the global world and provide some recommendations for team members and team leader to manage the global team.

Introduction

Most of the organizations see team building as a tool to create an atmosphere that increases employees' motivation which may help to improve business performance. It also helps to increase creativity and innovation. Team means a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, a set of performance goals and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable (Cook, 2009).

There has been an increasing trend in the world towards globalization, it has lead to many changes in the form of the team. As many companies expand their business to a variety of countries, it is common to develop global teams in the international companies. A global team is a group of employees selected from two or more cultural contexts and sometimes two or more companies who work together to coordinate, develop, or manage some aspect of a firm's global operations (Steers, 2010). The majority of business people agrees that working as a global team can create a better result than a local team because they can generate more ideas from different social or cultural perspectives.

There are two kinds of global teams which are global virtual teams and global co-located teams. Global co-located teams mean members from different cultural background join together working in the same town while global virtual teams mean members from different cultural background join together working in a different geographic location. As members of a virtual team are working under different time zone, different countries, different culture and even in different languages or accent, managing a global virtual team is far more difficult than manage a global co-located teams. Therefore, this paper will focus on the problems and challenges of building virtual teams in global companies and provide some suggestions for management to deal with those problems.

Virtual teams

Before discuss about the problems of building teams in global companies, we need to understand the term of virtual teams because its characteristics will create lots of challenges to the management.

Virtual teams, in which members use technology to interact with one another across geographic, organizational, and other boundaries, are becoming commonplace in organizations (Huang, 2010). There are some characteristics that can describe a virtual team. It involves different cultural and organizational groups of members communicate through technology and members usually work at different times and at different places. Besides, they are formed when organizations merge, subcontract work in different countries, develop global marketing strategies and R&D development. The above reasons and other organizational environment changes make virtual teams far more important than before. Management should place more emphasis on the challenges of managing a virtual team in order to commit an effective global team building.

In the following paper will discuss about different challenges that recent virtual teams are facing. Although many of these challenges are present in traditional teams, they become even more serious in a virtual setting. Challenges include lack of trust and collaboration, communication barriers, difficult to monitor and evaluate teams, poor performance and technology problems.

1. The challenge of building and maintaining trust and collaboration

Trust, then, is efficient. You save yourself lots of time and trouble by being able to rely on someone's word (Arrow, 1974). Trust is a critical success factor in a team which minimizes conflicts between team members. Mutual trust is very important that create an open environment for members to exchange ideas and engaging risk. Without mutual trust, team members may fail to express their point of view. In a virtual team setting, trust is more difficult to establish because virtual team members are geographically dispersed, lack of face-to-face contact and lack of shared understanding. They are just relying the telecommunication. This problem may lead to the outcome like decrease in productivity and the quality of teamwork. It was reported that trust was built over time, based on long-term consistent performance and behavior that created confidence (Oertig, 2006). However, as we had mentioned the virtual teams are lack of face-to-face communication, members of a virtual team are difficult to establish trust between team members. People usually trust one another when they share similarities, cultural and have face to face interaction. In a global business team, they are suffering from these two dimensions.

1.1. Lack of face-to-face interaction

The infrequent face-to-face contract was the top challenge reported by team members and perhaps not surprisingly, 43 percent of the leaders in our study concurred (DeRosa, 2010). When there is a lack of face-to-face contact, teams are difficult to build trust and monitor the members' work. When communicating face-to-face, people can focus on the visual cues of their team members to have a quick and immediate feedback. This visual cue enables team members easy to understand one another's point of view. However, without face-to-face contact, people easy to misunderstand their teammates and difficult to understand their concerns. Virtual team members often incorrectly assume others' intentions when they do not respond to emails or misinterpret the meaning and emotion of written language (Bergiel, Bergiel & Balsmeier, 2008). Also, majority of virtual teams holds meeting in person only a few times per year or even never. Building team and trust in a team require frequent face-to-face contact and interaction, however, this infrequent face-to-face contact will create conflict between team members, damaging trust and impact on productivity.

1.2.