Behavioral Competencies in Virtual Teams

Assessment Details
Assessment Topic:
You are tasked with building a new team for a global Digital Strategic Business Initiative for
your organization. Your team will be located in different geographic regions and members will
be from different functional domain (e.g., IT, customer support, marketing, sales). Because the
firm gives you the opportunity to build your team i.e., you can select the people you want on
your team.
Your boss asks you to write down for her how you plan to set-up and manage the team. You
prepare a written report for her (which is this written essay).
Assessment Guidelines:
Your boss wants you to cover the following aspects:
• How are you going to select the people for your virtual team? What kind of tools (if
any) will you use?
• What are some of the challenges to be expected from managing a virtual team? How
are you going to handle the challenges?
• How will you manage the productivity of the team? How do you plan to schedule
meetings and communication within the team?
• What are your own leadership principles and how will you get them to work out in
your role of manager of that virtual team?
Your organization practices good H/R management methods and you have access to a variety
of psychometric and competency testing tools. There are no budget constraints for you.
Purpose:
Successfully managing virtual teams requires managers to understand what some of the
challenges might be and having a good command of tools for managing people who they may
only see or hear through digital media. Also, success depends on team composition and
planification of communication, rules of conduct, and clear boundaries. These elements of
successful virtual teams can and should be planned before works of the virtual team
commences.
Links to module intended learning outcomes:
The assignment relates to the following intended learning outcomes for the module:
• Understand different team roles in volatile and complex virtual contexts
• Reflect on practical experience in virtual teams.
• Assess their own strengths and weaknesses in a team context as well as their
individual development needs
• Explain and synthesize the principles of collaboration in virtual teams themselves
• Construct the factors leading to the emergence of a leader in a virtual team in different
stages of virtual team development
Special Instructions:
Make sure you don’t miss the right entry point into the assessment. This is about you as the
benchmark so to speak, in building a virtual team. I want to see how you approach the task. So
don’t write “how managers should do this,” I want to see you planning the task (that mean
you should be writing in the first-person). One of the key theories in this module is that each
of us has leadership and design competencies and therefore each of us is suited to be a
manager – if, and this is the crux, we know our competencies and select team members based
on their complementary competencies to ours. Selecting team members based on similarity,
that’s not what counts in team building.
Primary Assessment Task Criteria:
Your written essay will be assessed based on the following criteria:
• The conclusiveness of your train of thought. 29%
• Your command of tools that help you set-up the virtual team. 20%
• Your understanding of what challenges you may encounter with your virtual team and
how you will handle them. 20%
• Professional Formatting and Harvard Referencing. 10%
Answer the Question:
It may seem obvious, but make sure you are answering the question you have been set, not the
question you would prefer to answer. If the brief has a number of tasks or parts, answer all of
them. Parts that involve evaluation or analysis are usually longer and worth more marks than
parts that ask for description or explanation. Keep the brief in front of you and check it
regularly.