Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Managing Virtual Teams

2017; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 60; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

1930-0166

Albert L. Johnson,

Collaboration in agile enterprises

Managing Virtual Teams Silvester Ivanaj and Claire Bozon (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016) Virtual teams are, essentially, project or operational teams of people who work within a larger organization but are not collocated in a single facility. As remote collaboration technologies have improved and become widely used, possibilities for such teams have expanded. Global organizations are increasingly assembling such teams in an effort to bring together the best people for a given project, regardless of their location. But although they offer clear advantages, virtual teams present new challenges for project and program management. Managing Virtual Teams provides an extensive review of the current research into and case studies of virtual commercial and industrial teams. The volume is academic in its approach, although its authors come from varied backgrounds: Silvester Ivanaj is an associate professor at the ICN Business School, Nancy-Metz with more than 50 publications on advanced management practices and environmental sustainability, and Claire Bozon, who received her MBA from the ICN Business School, is a raw material procurement manager at Brasserie de Champigneuilles in Nancy, France. The review they provide is quite thorough, describing strategy, tactics, and interventions for managing virtual teams and the people in them and identifying the main inputs, processes, and outputs of that management process. It summarizes enough of what is known about the management of virtual teams in modern industrial and service organizations to yield useful insights into how that knowledge might be applied in various contexts; a handful of case studies exemplify practical applications. It is the sort of book one might first encounter as a textbook for an advanced professional course and then keep for later use as a handbook. Managing Virtual Teams is interesting to me because, although I've managed many teams, virtual and not, I've had only my own experience as a framework for understanding and improving my virtual team skills. I think of my approach as somewhat like cooking a pot roast: the meat of it was carved from informal coaching I received from peers and superiors, with feedback from subordinates, and the taste came from the seasoning of my triumphs and blunders. Over time, I've tried various approaches to managing teams efficiently and effectively, while caring about and for the people on those teams. Many approaches worked, but almost as many resulted in learning experiences laced with teachable moments and mid-project course corrections. …