BUSI 427 Week 7 Discussion Board Forum 4: Thread Example

Discussion Board Forum 4 Thread: Accountability and Virtual Teams

BUSI 427 Team Dynamics, Discussion Board Forum 4: Thread

Thread by [Student Name]

The forum topic and the software team are composites; the Lencioni book, the textbook and the research cited are real, and the structure follows Liberty's public course guide for BUSI 427.

Lencioni (2002) defines the fourth dysfunction, avoidance of accountability, as the unwillingness of team members to call their peers on performance or behaviors that might hurt the team. In his model it rests on the dysfunctions below it: people who have not committed clearly to decisions hesitate to hold one another to them, and people who do not trust one another avoid uncomfortable conversations. I want to argue that this dysfunction becomes more dangerous in virtual teams, the subject of the later chapters in Levi (2017), because remote work hides effort and makes peer confrontation even easier to avoid.

The research on social loafing explains why visibility matters. Pooling seventy-eight studies, Karau and Williams (1993) confirmed that effort usually drops in groups, and the drop was largest when no one's individual share could be singled out or judged, when the task seemed unimportant and when people worked with strangers. Virtual teams often combine all three conditions. A team member working from home whose part of a project is invisible until the deadline has many opportunities to drift, and peers who never see the work have little basis for raising concerns.

Leadership research adds a second reason. Hoch and Kozlowski (2014), comparing teams with more and less face-to-face contact, found that a formal leader's influence on results faded as contact grew more remote, whereas structures such as clear rewards and set communication routines and leadership spread across members still predicted better results. In a virtual team, accountability cannot depend on a manager watching; it has to be built into the structure and shared among peers. Gilson et al. (2015), reviewing ten years of virtual team research, likewise point to the importance of deliberate practices for coordination and trust when members rarely meet.

Consider a software team with six developers in four time zones. Deadlines slip, and in retrospectives everyone is polite. Applying Lencioni's remedies with the research in mind, the team could post each member's weekly commitments on a shared board, so contributions are identifiable; hold a short weekly review in which each person shows working code rather than describing it; and adopt a team rule, modeled by the leader, that anyone may ask a peer about a missed commitment without it being taken as an attack. These steps address the conditions that encourage loafing and make peer accountability a normal part of the work.

Lencioni argues that the best teams hold one another accountable rather than relying on the leader. The research suggests that in virtual teams this is not just better but necessary, because the manager simply cannot see enough of the work to be the only source of accountability.

There is a risk in this approach that Lencioni's pyramid helps explain. Visible commitments can feel like surveillance if the team lacks trust, and members may game the board by committing only to easy tasks. That is why the remedies cannot start at the fourth level. A virtual team that has not built trust and committed to shared goals will experience peer accountability as policing; one that has will experience it as mutual support.

References

Gilson, L. L., Maynard, M. T., Jones Young, N. C., Vartiainen, M., & Hakonen, M. (2015). Virtual teams research: 10 years, 10 themes, and 10 opportunities. Journal of Management, 41(5), 1313-1337. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206314559946

Hoch, J. E., & Kozlowski, S. W. J. (2014). Leading virtual teams: Hierarchical leadership, structural supports, and shared team leadership. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99(3), 390-403. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030264

Karau, S. J., & Williams, K. D. (1993). Social loafing: A meta-analytic review and theoretical integration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(4), 681-706. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.65.4.681

Lencioni, P. (2002). The five dysfunctions of a team: A leadership fable. Jossey-Bass.

Levi, D. (2017). Group dynamics for teams (5th ed.). SAGE Publications.