Evaluation of the prospects of a virtual team

Running head: MANAGEMENT COMMUNICATION
MANAGEMENT COMMUNICATION
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1MANAGEMENT COMMUNICATION
To: The Marketing Director, Company XYZ
From: The planning team
Date: 30/11/2018
Re: Evaluation of the prospects of a virtual team
1. Introduction
1.1 Purpose
The purpose of this short report is to evaluate the prospect of Virtual teams and provide
arguments either in favour or against the creation of a virtual team. This is to bring to your notice
that this report is analysing the prospects of success for the organization if a virtual team is
formed with members from Bangalore, Los Angeles, Shanghai and Melbourne.
1.2 Thesis statement
The great communicational development that has been witnessed over the years can help in the
creation of an effective virtual team and enhance the global performance of the company.
2. Argument
Businesses across the world are becoming global and the concept of virtual teams have been
present for quite some time. Virtual teams are teams made up of various people from different
parts of the world. This way people can interact more effectively and a lot of issues that might
arise when managing a normal team is reduced effectively. Virtual teams have been known to
have failed in the past. In fact in previous studies it has been indicated that virtual teams have
often fell short of achieving their targets and many teams have considered themselves to be
highly unsuccessful. However, there remain significant contradictions in relation to the kind of

2MANAGEMENT COMMUNICATION
virtuality that the organizations of the respondents provided to the virtual teams. Hence, there
can also be a debate in regards to how virtual the activities of the teams have been.
Hoch and Kozlowski (2014) argue that the performances of the unsuccessful virtual
teams can be attributed to the implementation of the same organizational hierarchies that are
implemented in normal organizational environments. Hence, it can be said that most of the
previous cases of failing virtual teams have been due to gross mismanagement of the teams on
the part of the organizational leadership. Virtual teams can be cost effective and feasible ways to
manage global workforces for multinational organizations. It has been found in some significant
researches that if leaders of virtual teams are provided with appropriate training, orientation and
support, they can effectively manage teams that can provide greater productivity to the
organization. Thus, in many ways virtual teams need to be effectively handled in order to reap
the benefits of a cost effective, global and flexible team network. Moreover, if shared leadership
or division of leadership roles among the team members is implemented, it can be more effective
towards bringing out better team performances (Hoegl and Muethel 2016).
More emphasis should be provided for the usage of appropriate and effective
communicational technologies that can increase communicational requirements.
Counterproductive message can affect the effectiveness of virtual teams. Hence, rules can be
implemented where the team members can only provide limited amount of messages. For
example- team members being able to provide only one key idea in an email when discussing
about a project issue (Wadsworth and Blanchard 2015). Virtual teams can be given better
technologies that can help in effective communication without disruptions. Specially developed
globally managed software can be used for this purpose.