Advantages and Disadvantages of Virtual Teams in Organizational Behavior

Running head: ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
Name of the Student
Name of the Organization
Author Note

1ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
Answer to Question 1
Advantages of Virtual Teams
 Savings of cost: The cost savings is considered to be as the biggest advantage of virtual team
which is enjoyed by any organization. The organization may do away with a large amount of
expenses on the estate and spaces of office which are real, uses bills like gas, water or
electricity and travel of the executives. A number of organizations outsource their part of
operations to all the regions which are effective of cost. Therefore, the cost of production
also reduces with the reduction of the cost of raw material, cost of operation and lesser wages
of the members in all the locations.
 Increment in the productivity: Virtual team members have high focus on the task and they do
not deal with bureaucracy unnecessarily, thereby increasing the productivity which
ultimately shows higher profits (Schmidt 2014). A wide range of skills is seen to be applied
for all kinds of practical activities as well as sharing ideas can be able to play an important in
acquiring a great depth in the understanding of a particular area of subject.
 New Opportunities: Virtual teams are responsible for creating new opportunities for the
people who are a little less mobile and hesitate a lot in relocating due to any personal issue
(Maynard and Gilson 2014).
 Development of skills: Being a part of the virtual team, it will help a lot in developing skills
which are mostly interpersonal like speaking or listening. It also helps in the development of
some other skills like leadership as well as providing motivation to others. Some of the skills
are very much useful throughout the whole career of academics and each and every skill is
valued by all the employers.

2ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
 Knowing much more about yourself: Collaboration with others will help in identifying all the
individual strengths as well as weaknesses. A self-awareness which is much more enhanced
will help in approaching to learning to a great extent.
 Reduction in the time to market: As the members mostly span the zones of time period, there
can a separate team who will be working on a similar project throughout the whole day.
Therefore, when one of the members will sleep, there will remain some other member who
will start working where the former will leave (Alsharo, Gregg and Ramirez 2017). This will
reduce the development time of the products as well as improve the response time for
demanding markets which are both global as well as local.
 Global talent’s leverage: All the virtual teams allow the organizations for looking into the
talent which are beyond the country’s origin. This has brought together all the experts as well
as specialists throughout the globe for working together on the project. Increased sharing of
knowledge and improved innovation is seen as the human capital of organization mostly
share the understanding of markets which are both global as well as local.
Disadvantages of Virtual Teams
 Technology cost: The successful working of a virtual team is supported by the proper
utilization of several tools like emails or video conferencing. The cost which is associated
with both the installation and the maintenance of the tools is high.
 Rise of conflicts: There is a rise of a number of conflicts due to the differences in culture
between the virtual team members.
 Social isolation: Several members of the virtual teams are affected greatly by the lack of
interactions physically (Hoch and Kozlowski 2014). Most of the communications in the
environment which is virtual is oriented of task.