Team Dynamic

Running head: TEAM DYNAMIC
Team Dynamic
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

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Introduction:
The essay aims at providing an insight into team dynamic by outlining how dispersion
applies to the team. The essay also puts forward a discussion on the positive and the negative
impacts of dispersion. In addition, there is also discussion about potential approaches that helps
in overcoming the negative impact of dispersion in respect to the team along with an evaluation
of their success within teams depending on their past application. Teams are simply the building
blocks of the organization and provide companies with means that combines talents, perspectives
and skills of the individual group in achieving the corporate goals. Previously, the managers
collocated team members due to the higher levels of interdependencies inherent within the group
work. In recent times, increasing number of companies have started to organize their project over
the distance, manage teams consisting of people in dispersed location, different cultural
background, language and the varied values systems. In the last 10 years, investigations have put
forward the difference between the performance of the collocated and the dispersed teams with
the assumption that the members of dispersed team never met face to face in person. Dispersion
is matter of kind and not degree and most of the teams remains dispersed at certain level. They
either remain temporally separated, spatially separated, culturally diverse and configurationally
uneven. In this essay, the discussion revolves around geographical distributed team also referred
as the virtual team where the members belong to the different countries. It has been found that
the virtual teams seem to put forward opportunities despite the immense managerial challenges.
Besides, the appropriate processes allow the dispersed team in significantly outperforming their
counterparts.

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Discussion:
How Dispersion Applies to the Team and Its Positive and Negative Impacts
The level of dispersion of the team is neither fixed nor predetermined; it represents an
organizational design parameter that allows the organization in adjusting and setting themselves
(Siebdrat, Hoegl and Ernst 2009). While making decisions, the managers should therefore
consider the various advantages and disadvantages of dispersion. Several studies have put
forward that the collaboration across countries is more difficult compared to the collocated
environment (Charlier et al. 2016). The issues involve the difficulties in coordination and
communication, enhanced inability in establishing common ground and reduced trust. Proximity
however tend to promote frequent communication and development of more positive and closer
interpersonal relationships. Besides, the physical presence of the coworkers at regular intervals
also helps in improving the feelings of fondness, familiarity, and informal interactions that serves
in strengthening the social ties (Hoch and Kozlowski 2014). Physical distance on the other hand
decreases affinity and closeness that results in the greater potential for the conflict (Bathelt and
Turi 2013). Besides, other issues also come up with distance that includes the negotiation of the
team members with the multiple time zones and requiring them in recognizing the workdays for
accommodating the work schedule of the others. These situations might result in confusion and
frustration especially when the coworkers remain regularly unavailable for clarification or
discussion of issues related to task.
There are also certain advantages of dispersion. First, it allows the team in accomplishing
the complex activities such as the research and the development (Lilian 2014). Clustering of
competencies by larger companies in varied areas of excellence helps in reducing the cost and

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global know how (Jang 2013). Each of the competence centres tends to enhance the depth of the
expertise to be strong while diversity of the functional background remains relatively weak due
to the aspect of specialization. Managers are also able to take certain advantage of the
organizational structure through gathering employees from the different locations in certain
networks for the creation of the team that enables in optimally integrating different expertise
pools for performing a specific task (Erez et al. 2013). Besides, the companies can remain in an
advantageous position due to the enhanced heterogeneity that remains inherent within nature of
the dispersed teams. In other words, virtual teams have a tendency of incorporating higher levels
of demographic and structural diversity compared to the collocated teams where both the types
of the diversity seem beneficial (Hoegl and Muethel 2016). Team members from multiple
locations having association with various business units and reporting to the different managers
also results in the structural diversity (Pinjani and Palvia 2013). This type of diversity is valuable
for the team as it exposed the members to the heterogeneous sources of the feedback, work
experience and the networking opportunities. Further, the team members belonging to the virtual
team also remain nationally diverse. However, such diversity might complicate the team
dynamics but it enhances the problems solving capacity of group.
Let us now look into how dispersion is advantageous to our team. We have a virtually
dispersed team with one member living in Vietnam and the others in Australia and Srilanka. One
of the benefits of having a virtually dispersed team remains in gathering a wider variety of
talent. This is because looking at the local applicants might not provide the manager with the
ideal solution (Eubanks et al. 2016). Expansion of the hiring pool to the national and the
international search brings in increasing number of candidates that exceeds or meets the job
qualification (Scott and Wildman 2015). These candidates are unable to either relocate or require