Virtual Team Communication: Management of Global Virtual Teams

This presentation focuses on the challenges and opportunities of virtual team communication. It begins by highlighting the increasing prevalence of virtual teams in a globalized business environment, emphasizing their role in enhancing responsiveness and fostering professional development. The presentation then delves into the specific challenges that arise in managing virtual teams, such as the lack of face-to-face interaction, difficulties in maintaining uniform goals, cultural and language barriers, time zone differences, and technological issues. It provides insights into how managers can address these challenges to improve communication, collaboration, and overall team performance. The presentation references key academic sources to support its arguments and offers practical strategies for effective virtual team management.

Running head: VIRTUAL TEAM COMMUNICATION
Virtual team communication
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First slide:
As workplaces have started adopting a more global perspective in handling their
businesses, a big part of the job for managers becomes handling and supervising virtual
teams. The use of global virtual teams significantly help the respective companies in
increasing their responsiveness to the change occurring in the hyper-competitive market that
we have in our society today (Dulebohn and Hoch 2017). Virtual teams open up various
avenues for personal and professional development of employees because being in a virtual
team gives an individual the perception that they can build on their dream without being
bound by geographical, or any, boundaries. However, the advantages of carrying out virtual
teams is still unmatched and is the best way for companies to be able to compete in a
globalised society.
Second Slide:
As mentioned in the slide before, there are many unique challenges that arise in a
company when they decide to work with virtual teams that have team members in different
countries. One of the main ones is the lack of face-to-face communication, because there are
high chances of communications to become muddled when going through a lot of
intermediate mediums as it happens in virtual teams, and it can never meet up to the level of
efficiency that comes from face-to-face communication (Ford, Piccolo and Ford 2017). The
second challenge is that it becomes increasingly difficult for managers to upkeep uniform
goals and priorities among all the team members, because of the lack of interaction between
the team members. Virtual team members usually originate from different countries and
usually also speak different languages which brings forward the issue of misunderstandings
due to cultural and language discrepancy. Challenges with time differences in these countries
can also become a hurdle because it becomes difficult for manages to pick a common time

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that will be convenient for everycone. Technology, as much as it has advanced, cannot run
smoothly and without interruption so technical difficulties are a big concern for managers in
order to coordinate their allocation of tasks.

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References:
Dulebohn, J.H. and Hoch, J.E., 2017. Virtual teams in organizations.
Ford, R.C., Piccolo, R.F. and Ford, L.R., 2017. Strategies for building effective virtual teams:
Trust is key. Business Horizons, 60(1), pp.25-34.