Some claim that more than half of
all professional employees are now in virtual teams, where virtual means that
one or more of the following is true: 1) team members are dispersed, 2) team
members communicate electronically, and 3) team structure is shifting over time. I am the member of such teams, and my teams are also
multinational (some count that as a
dimension of virtualness too). All of these factors make it harder to manage
teams, and especially hard for teams that innovate rather than perform
standard tasks. Why? Because teams that innovate need close communications in
order to share idea, develop them further, and avoid misunderstandings along
the way. Distance, in any form, makes this harder.
So why let innovating teams be
virtual? Part of the reason must be that managers are confident in the results. However, research in Administrative Science Quarterly by Christina Gibson and Jennifer Gibbs looked at the issue and found that there are significant
drawbacks in making teams virtual. Along each dimension of virtualness, teams
lost some innovation ability. But importantly, they also found that this
negative effect could be reduced. If the teams were managed in a way that made
communication psychologically safe, there was still reduced innovativeness in
more virtual teams, but less reduction.
Psychological safety is a simple
idea because it just means that team members should be able to say things
without fear that other team members will react negatively, even if they are
not sure that what they are saying is correct. This is important because when
doing innovations, it is normal to be in doubt, but important to bring up
issues, especially those that are uncertain, because innovation comes from
testing out and resolving uncertainty. So, this is very useful research, with clear
implications for how one can design teams for innovation.
The research also has two other
features I wanted to mention. One is
that the research is 10 years old, but still an important insight. Good
research stays current a long time. The other is that part of the research was
done on a fighter aircraft budgeted to 200 billion, so obviously a context
calling for highly innovative teams. They don’t say what aircraft it is, but I
can guess because I happen to know about an aircraft program that was budgeted
to 200 billion but now costs 400 billion. Psychological safety in virtual teams makes a difference... The picture of my guess on the aircraft is in this post.