Challenges and Strategies for Effective Global Team Management

This report investigates the challenges faced in managing global teams, focusing on leadership, communication, and cultural differences. The report examines the shift towards virtual teams and the associated cost benefits, as well as issues such as work-life balance, team building across countries, supervision, and the development of a global mindset. The project objectives include evaluating the challenges faced by management in global teams, identifying best practices, and understanding global challenges. The literature review discusses challenges like local HR expertise, job grade consistency, managing dispersed staff, cultural diversity, and the lack of face-to-face interaction. The research design incorporates qualitative and quantitative methods, including interviews and questionnaires. The report also addresses research limitations such as time constraints and sample size. Finally, the conclusion emphasizes the crucial role of leadership in ensuring team effectiveness in a virtual environment.

Report
Student Name
Institute Name

Contents
Introduction.................................................................................................................................................3
Project Objective.........................................................................................................................................3
Project Scope...............................................................................................................................................3
Literature Review........................................................................................................................................4
Research Questions/Hypothesis..................................................................................................................6
Primary Question.....................................................................................................................................6
Secondary Questions...............................................................................................................................7
Research Design and Methodology.............................................................................................................7
Qualitative research................................................................................................................................7
Quantitative research..............................................................................................................................7
Research Limitations...................................................................................................................................8
Time Schedule.............................................................................................................................................8
Conclusion...................................................................................................................................................8
Reference....................................................................................................................................................9

Introduction
In last few years, organization have rapidly transformed into number of virtual teams since it has
become a popular way to connect as well as engage with the world and dispersed workforce.
This reduces the cost of the international association and assuring high level of speed and right
adaptability. The report will study in detail about organizations that are using global based
international teams or considering adopting this concept (Nkukwana et al., 2017). The discussion
will focus on the leadership of virtual teams, cost based benefit analysis of virtual based
interaction as well as face to face communication. The report will also focus on other challenges
like work life based issues, building teams from another country, supervision and evaluation of
virtual workforce and development of a mindset which works with virtual team globally.
Project Objective
The objective of the report is evaluating the challenges faced by the management while
managing a global team (Masuda et al., 2016). The report will focus on understanding different
challenges and collecting as well as codify the best practices as well as global challenges.
Project Scope
In an ideal situation worldwide, HR based policies for international IT or other virtual teams
must be consistent, fair as well as responsive enough to deal with any kind of emergency. It is
also expected that the designations as well as reporting structure must be equalized. It is also
important to understand that consistency on global level should permit and be aligned with
domestic laws as well as cultural level norms. This is a challenging practice since the variation of
current work culture and company’s structure or standards in every country (Stanley et al.,

2017). Moreover, the standard of living and overall cost also varies from region to region.
Therefore, from HR point of view, the policy of one size fits all models is redundant concept.
Also, there is struggle for consistencies as well, where management is expected to find different
ways for remotest teams to successfully have association with direct management (Soderhjelm et
al., 2016).
Literature Review
Following is the detailed discussion of challenges in managing the global teams: -
1. Get local expertise in HR practices: organization should have a local HR people in every
country to address and understand the local laws. It is also important to have local level
of expertise in HR practices as well as knowledge. The practices like recruitment and
training challenges are some of the important actions that needs to be managed and is
done differently in every location. The company just needs to get in touch with local
experts on the processes and laws (Tang et al., 2017).
2. Creation of job grade consistency with the help of a model: a company like Euroclear is
now slowly moving in the direction of adopting job evaluation models from consulting
any HR based organization like Hay Group. Adoption of models helps in organizing
varied job kind into vertical forms like management of people, development of product,
supporting the business and project level management. This further helps in providing a
goal based for comparison and management of roles and people across diverse locations.
For example, a manager of hundred odd people may look much more significant to a
company than single level contributor (Cross, 2016). However, a single level of
contributor at horizontal grade is very high since there is specialized level of expertise

where men or women is equally important. Also, the grade level cannot be treated equally
as a title and people tile are more subjected to local level conventions.
3. Management of dispersed staff in the form of portfolio teams: a company called ON
Semiconductor has an IT based team that helps in supporting sales in Slovakia. In
addition, the company also has a factory in Hong Kong where the main sales office is
established. The customer service centre is in Shenzhen and in Kuala Lumpur is a
domestic development unit (Greiver et al., 2016). This organization can overcome the
potential to completely disconnect between varied locations by having a single point for
sales in IT portfolio and headquarter is Phoenix which is based in Arizona. Headquarter
sets the goals as well as distributes the work among the member of that portfolio team
despite their location. Similar methods can help with IT based staff working with
manufacturing unit, HR department, finance and other international corporate activities.
4. Different cultures: human relationships and the way the public can handle the common
cases in team of software development can collapse in a minute. The cultural diversity
and its basic understanding are becoming crucial for companies to handle virtual teams,
since a normal conversation in one culture may be offensive in another (Cohen et al.,
2017). The fact, staff in headquarter don’t speak the native language of the country may
make things even more sensitive. The way to overcome the issue is handling the situation
with clarity in motives and polite attitude. It is important for the manager to keep the tone
polite, calm as well as confident about the certain message needed to be communicated
and with proper clarity.
5. Lacking face to face interaction: one of the biggest issues while managing global teams,
specifically in the beginning was the reason that there was no kind of direct

communication along with any face to face meetings. So, the challenge is how to manage
the team like this and the solution lies in virtual meetings. Therefore, what is required
here is right kind of software and a good internet connection (Alhaqbani et al., 2016). In
case of daily meetings that help in catching up with present function and deletion of
possible restrictions, weekly meeting based on planning as well as shows internal level of
development and one meeting each month to show the overall status of various
stakeholders, with product owners.
6. Time zones: another major challenge while managing global team is varied time zones. In
addition, in IT industry, the developers have other jobs as well which results in reducing
the probability of their presence to certain hours. So, in case many managed needs to
setup daily or weekly meetings, it becomes a challenge to coordinate a time for it as per
the time zone of every country (Daood et al., 2017).
7. Evaluation of performance: human being by nature loses focus easily and the situation
also gets worse when they work from home instead of typical workplace culture. To
avoid such cases and ensure that every member of team is productive while working, it is
important to set important goals. It can be any kind of goals, like team goals, or weekly or
quarterly goals. It is also important that goals are clear to each person. However, the most
critical way is that goals can be objectified or quantifiable. The way it can be measured
must be shared with all the team members. Accordingly, every team member will be
ranked and evaluated (Cawsey et al., 2016).
Research Questions/Hypothesis
Primary Question

1. What are the challenges that a manger face while handling the global team?
Secondary Questions
1. How those challenges should be handled?
2. Why it is important to go global for organizations in today’s time?
Research Design and Methodology
Qualitative research
The qualitative research is a collection as well as analysis of many non-numerical based
functions consisting of words, pictures and activities and it doesn’t mean that one can apply a
structure based approach for all research related efforts. The report will form some focused
questions to ask from the organizations that managed global team. It is also important to get
various inputs from multiple users to get better insight about things (Newton, 2017). The sample
size for this research will be limited to thirty global companies.
Quantitative research
Various variables will be evaluated that in this case will vary and can be measured, manipulated
as well as controlled in the study. The overall design is decided carefully, in a systematic manner
and come with a controlled plan that finds varied answers to the question of the study. This will
help in providing a specific road map for all the angles to the study. The questionnaire will be
formed to ask certain well-structured questions specifically designed to analyze the internal
conflicts and challenges people face while working in a global team. The sample size while
conducting quantitative research will be 50 organizations.

Research Limitations
The research is prepared keeping all the important points in mind, there are still some limitations.
First, the research is conducted in two-time periods which lasted for four weeks. The time is not
enough for the researcher to be able to observe minutely all the performances of the team and
overall challenges organizations face in their day to day operations (Gregory et al, 2016).
Secondly, the population taken for qualitative research is small and only thirty organizations
might not be able to show the lakhs of global companies dealing with the challenges on daily
basis. Thirdly, the questionnaire is designed to understand the issues organizations are facing
while handling the virtual team (Lohikoski et al., 2016). However, it may not be able to provide
enough proofs to evaluate the issues properly.
Time Schedule
Work Start Date End Date
Project Scope 1st September 5th September
Literature Review 6th September 13th September
Research Methodology 14th September 17th September
Limitations 18th September 20th September
Final Submission 20th September 22nd September
Conclusion
In the end, it can be said easily that there is no clear way to handle a situation while dealing with
virtual team however understanding of the roles as well as competencies of the virtual leaders are
crucial for the team effectiveness. The characteristics of leadership also show that the simple
leadership role in a normal setting requires different skills than managing a team in virtual

setting. A leader who can interact in an effective manner in a more personal setting may not be
able to do it properly in virtual culture. A leader who can establish trust in local setting may not
be able to do it in virtual setting (Costa et al., 2017). Leader should understand the issue face by
varied virtual teams and must also invest more efforts to make sure that teams are using the
resources to achieve the team goals.

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