MGMT 527 Week 7 DB Forum 4 Thread Example

Discussion Board Forum 4: Thread

MGMT 527 Leading Project Teams, Discussion Board Forum 4: Thread

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt, the implant company and its project are composites standing in for the course's own forum; Scripture and the peer-reviewed studies are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for MGMT 527.

Three months into our label revision project, the translation group in Cork delivered German, French and Italian versions of the instructions for use for our knee implant line. They were excellent translations of a draft that our regulatory team in Warsaw, Indiana, had revised two weeks earlier. No one had told Cork, and no one in Cork had asked, because each site assumed the other knew what it knew. We lost three weeks and about $40,000 in translation costs on a fourteen-month project to revise 240 product labels for the European Union's medical device regulation, with print production in our plant in Suzhou.

Cramton (2001), studying dispersed student teams that collaborated across universities, called this the mutual knowledge problem. She found that dispersed members often failed to share context, did not know what information their partners lacked and misinterpreted silence, sometimes blaming partners personally for problems caused by distance. That described us exactly; by the end of that month, our regulatory lead was calling the Cork group careless, and Cork thought Indiana disorganized. Neither view was fair. Both groups were careful and organized within their own walls; what failed was the space between the sites, where no one owned the question of which draft was current.

We changed three things. First, we moved every label draft into one controlled document repository, and only the current version could be opened for work. Second, we set a weekly overlap hour at 8 a.m. in Indiana, 1 p.m. in Cork and 8 p.m. in Suzhou, the only time all three sites were awake, and used it for decisions rather than updates. Third, each review cycle was led by a different site, so that every group took a turn owning the schedule.

Research helps explain why these changes worked. Hoch and Kozlowski (2014), studying 101 research and development teams, found that the more virtual a team was, the weaker the link between hierarchical leadership and performance and the stronger the link for structural supports, such as reliable information management and fair rewards, while shared team leadership was related to performance whatever the degree of virtuality. Our repository and overlap hour were structural supports, and the rotating site lead was a form of shared leadership. A decade of studies, as Gilson et al. (2015) summarize it, shows that how virtual a team is varies by degree and that leadership, trust and the way technology is used shape outcomes more than distance itself.

Paul led churches he could not visit. Writing to the Colossians, he told them that though he was absent in body, he was with them in spirit, rejoicing to see their good order and firm faith (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Colossians 2:5). Paul's letters were his structural support, and they carried both instruction and affection across the distance. I learned on this project that a dispersed team needs both: clear systems, and a leader who makes the effort to know each site's people as well as their deliverables.

The project finished in month fifteen, one month late but with no further rework, and the Cork and Indiana leads now share a standing call on their next project, which they asked for themselves. Classmates: what has helped your dispersed teams most, structure or relationships, and can one work without the other?

References

Cramton, C. D. (2001). The mutual knowledge problem and its consequences for dispersed collaboration. Organization Science, 12(3), 346-371. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.12.3.346.10098

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

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