MGMT 527 Week 8 DB Forum 4 Replies Example

Discussion Board Forum 4: Replies

MGMT 527 Leading Project Teams, Discussion Board Forum 4: Replies (two)

Thread by [Student Name]

The two classmates, their threads and the forum prompt on leading a dispersed team are composites standing in for the course's own; Scripture and the peer-reviewed studies cited are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for MGMT 527.

Reply to Jasmine

Jasmine, your thread about consolidating two counties' emergency dispatch centers into one regional center was a vivid picture of a team that rarely met. Your six shift supervisors worked hybrid schedules, two counties' policies had to be merged into one manual, and you concluded that the supervisors needed more direction from you to keep the project on track.

I wonder if the evidence points the other way. Kirkman et al. (2004), studying 35 sales and service teams in a high-technology firm, found that team empowerment was related to virtual team performance and to customer satisfaction, and that the relationship was stronger for teams that held fewer face-to-face meetings. In other words, the less a team could meet in person, the more it gained from having real authority over its work. Your supervisors may have stalled not because they lacked direction but because they were waiting for decisions they were not allowed to make.

One option would be to give each pair of supervisors, one from each county, ownership of a section of the merged manual, with authority to settle differences in that section and report the result. That would also build cross-county relationships before the centers physically merge, and it would give you something better to do in your weekly check-ins than chase status: you could review each pair's decisions and step in only where two sections of the manual conflict.

When your supervisors did meet in person, were the decisions they made there carried out more quickly?

Reply to Derek

Derek, your thread on coordinating the volunteer media crew that livestreams services at your church's three campuses made me smile, especially the Sunday when the north campus switched to the sermon feed during the closing song. You blamed the streaming software for the missed cues.

The software may be part of it, but research on dispersed teams suggests looking at the climate as well. In their multi-industry research on innovation teams, Gibson and Gibbs (2006) found that dispersion, dependence on electronic communication, changing membership and national diversity each tended to reduce innovation, and that the damage shrank where members felt safe to speak openly with one another. Your volunteers change from week to week and rarely see one another, and teams built that way are the ones where an open, speak-up climate counts for the most. A volunteer at the north campus who is unsure whether the song has ended may stay silent rather than ask on the shared channel.

Hebrews asks believers to think about how to spur each other on toward love and good deeds, and warns against giving up the habit of gathering, since gathering is where encouragement happens (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Hebrews 10:24-25). A crew that never meets will rarely feel free to speak up on a headset. A quarterly in-person training night across the three campuses might do more for your cues than a software upgrade.

How often do the volunteers on different campuses talk outside of Sunday mornings?

References

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

Gibson, C. B., & Gibbs, J. L. (2006). Unpacking the concept of virtuality: The effects of geographic dispersion, electronic dependence, dynamic structure, and national diversity on team innovation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 51(3), 451-495. https://doi.org/10.2189/asqu.51.3.451

Kirkman, B. L., Rosen, B., Tesluk, P. E., & Gibson, C. B. (2004). The impact of team empowerment on virtual team performance: The moderating role of face-to-face interaction. Academy of Management Journal, 47(2), 175-192. https://doi.org/10.2307/20159571