Introduction
Our first meet
hold on QQ. In this meet, we introduce ourselves and talk about opinion about
this course, some views and ideas about assignment and this virtual
collaboration. Then we set up the period for next meeting. Roughly we meet
every week on QQ and I, Yakee and Tami could meet more than one time a week,
because we have another course in the same class. In the gap of two meeting, if
we have some opinions or ideas, we can leave it on QQ group in which all of our
teammates can see it, when they sign in their QQ account. If their some urgent
things need to inform others, we would use phone call. In the first meet, we
did some commitments like we promise to attend meeting on line on time, and pay
attention and effort on this cooperation.
Sometimes QQ
video can work well, but sometimes especially if we confront rush hours of
internet, the video conversation cannot be hold well. In this situation, we
tend to hold phone conversation. But it is not perfect way too, because we do
not have the conference telephone. And meanwhile not all the teammates’ cell
phones are smart enough to support many people on line. So our day group and
evening group should meet separately and then we three or two people use one
phone, then we can communicate with each other by phone. So sometimes IM like
MSN or QQ are good tools, when we located in different areas or say there are
long distance between us. But if sometimes we want to see others face, you know
when you are talking seeing others eyes, it will be easier for you to
understand each other and be good at building trust between each others.
When we want to
date a time to meet or decide something we leave message on QQ, and if they
have opinions about those, they should reply the messages, at least one day
before the date or decision work. If we have another idea we can talk about
these with them on QQ or phone call.
Description of
three major conflicts in our teamwork
Next
I will talk about the first conflict between our day group and night group. It happened
at the beginning of our first cooperation, to choose two companies and present
the virtual communication and collaboration between them with creativity. We
meet conflict because evening group think the topic professor want is virtual
collaboration in one company, but not the virtual collaboration between the two
companies that separately chosen by day and night group.
The second time
of conflict happened after the first presentation and evening group know that
they have misunderstanding about our task. But because we are some ones that
did not see each others before, that mean we are not familiar with them. Perhaps
for keeping face, evening group this time do their best to find mistake on our
company setting and virtual collaboration way. They know their plan cannot run
because of misunderstanding and then they do their best to find mistake on our
plan. What they want is throw both of our plans and build a new one, because
they think our plan lack of creativity. This time we discuss it for a long
time, and finally get a good result— we got unified.
The third time
of conflict happened when we do the final assignment. This time we become more
familiar than beginning and relatively cooperate better than the first time. But
this time the conflict is we need to separate our personal task, that means we
are responsible for our own parts, and after we work out it, we combine and
summarize them. The problem here is there is just a short time that we know
each other. We did not have opportunity to work together and know the real
ability of others between day group and evening group. We all do not want to
get a low grade because others’ bad work. So this time, the conflict is about
trust.
Feelings and
thought about the conflicts we meet in collaboration
I
think it is a good opportunity to practice our ability in communication especially
on virtual communication. We cannot get this experience from other courses. In
most of other courses the communication experience we get is about face to face
communication. In this course we not only practice our ability in virtual communication
area, at the same time we can get familiar with online communication tools which
are helpful for our future work, because in modern business circle, virtual
communication are becoming an important and tend to become a popular way of
cooperation in business circle step by step. At the same time, I tend to think
that virtual communication is more difficult than normal communication. Because
in fact human communication not only dependent on language or words itself, but
including judgment from others postures and detail changes in eyes. If we can
express our opinions face to face, we can catch information from all kinds of
way. If we communicate online, limited by internet technology, we cannot communicate
in the level of face to face communication.
For the first
conflict, when we find evening group misunderstanding the task, we try to
explain this in many ways and methods, but it does not work. If let me reflect
these, I think these is mainly because this is the first time to meet and talk
with each other and something worse is we cannot see each other face by face,
which built deeper gap between us. They do not listen what we said, because
they do not know us.
In
work and life time, proactive motions would be encouraged and when we confront
some tough things, we should face them and actively find way to handle it doing
our best. But in some cases, when we find that after we try and analyze, we
realize that it is a case that cannot be overcome only by our own efforts. And
then we figure out that in fact if we do nothing and just wait, there is
another way waiting there for us. In this conflict, we handled it finally
depending on wait, because they could get the right feedbacks from professor in
the next class.
Through this
conflict, I realized that not everything should be managed in your hand in team
work and we do not need to catch every detail things. What I should do is catch
the key. Because if we try to catch
everything, it is like someone in team only focus on task, but ignored others’
feelings. In team work if we only focus on what is right and what is wrong, but
ignore others’ feelings, we would not work together and cooperate well. When
people think the one who are talking with them, totally do not care there
feeling and ideals, it is not possible for them to collaborate well. So in
this case, I realize that if we keep go ahead to push them, it will be a kind
of ignoring of their feeling. In fact I find there is a good way to address it,
if we can keep patient enough. So we chose wait and final result prove what we
did were right.
In the second
conflict, different opinions happened mainly because we all think we are
Master, we all smart enough. So when others figure out a big mistake about us, perhaps
we can accept it, but we tend to avoid mention them again. I think is a
weakness of us. But the situation is our teammates in fact are just normal
people. When there some mistakes happened on them, they tend to ignore them. In
this situation, I realize we do not need to pay too attention on something that
would waste our much time. I think it is good to challenge new things, so
finally we choose tolerantly accept their opinions, drop our old plan and
create a new one together, because we
are a group. What we should do is focus on collaboration and finally gets a
good outcome and high level performance. There are not only one way to get
succeed. We can choose one that can be good at caring others’ feelings and keeping
good collaboration state.
I realize a very easy thing, but sometimes some
people tend to ignore it, when they too focus on task itself. The thing is we
all are human being. We can think. We can feel and we need cares and respects
from others, but not like some teammates who only know task but ignore others.
In the third
conflict, obviously the most important way to handle it is building trust
between us. It is not so easy, but we want to become a high performance
collaboration team, we must do this. So what we have done is find a tangible
way to build trust between us. In fact there is a method that is very useful to
build trust. It is build trust from
small success. What we did is
first talk about some small question existing in our report. Then we separate
tasks to each people and summarize our work outcomes later. After that, we find
that the works of others are in fact good jobs. So we tend to have more
confidence on the teammates. After that we separate slightly bigger task to
each others. If this time we succeed again, there would be more confidence on
each other. In fact this confidence on
others is a kind of mutual trust. After this kind of practice step by step, we become
trust on others’ ability.
In all of these
three conflicts, we all have experienced Conflict Process in Teams and luckily
we overcome all of them and in stage 4 Outcome, we get increased in team
performance.
Evaluation and
analysis
We know that the simplest and most far-reaching
solution for virtual teams is to have more structure and rules for interaction.
Because different people have different personality and background of growth,
so in this collaboration team we should unify the operation process and have
united rule. When some mistakes happened which will influence our collaboration,
we could judge that who are right or who are wrong. In fact, we have done this
at the beginning of our meet including setting meet frequency, method of
communication and the content that we should talk about every time. (Virtual Teams
Survey Report, 2012) And in fact everyone in this team can keep their
commitments made at the beginning.
Next what we do in overcoming conflicts
is building trust. In contingency theory (Fiedler& Chemers, 1974),
leadership style is described as task-motivated (Low LPC) and
relationship-motivated (High LCP). Like
leadership establishment, if we want to establish trust in trust, we should
focus on task and relationship these two dimensions to build trust. In many
occasions, conflicts are the promotion of improvement. In fact, our team mutual
trust increased thorough dealing with these conflicts
In the first and second conflicts, we can
overcome them, because we realize the importance of caring others’ feelings. Through
this way, teammates can feel real care and respect from others. Then we tend to
build a better relationship through this kind of mutual care and respect. This is trust-building in relationship
dimension.
In the third conflict, we build trust on
each others’ ability little by little. What
we do in fact is a kind of trust-building in task dimension. So in fact in
these three conflicts we finished our team trust-building in both task and
relationship dimensions.
Trust-building is one of the most
important parts in virtual team collaboration. United rules and operation
process is basic of good collaboration, and trust is something that a high
performance or excellent virtual team must own. If we have trust in each other,
the collaboration efficiency would get great improvement.
Conclusion
Like what we
have see in The effective teamwork matrix, if we review it, we will find that
all the traits of highest level of teamwork need high level mutual trust in
team. Like in team identity, we need ownership of the problem and accepting joint
responsibility, to get these we need depend on trust. Like in shared vision, we
need shared vision and set of objectives, developed collaboratively, if we want
to share vision collaboratively, we need trust first. In fact in all of the
follow items like Communication, Collaboration and participation, Issue
negotiation and resolution, all need mutual trust.
In this course, through virtual team
work I realized the importance of trust-building in team. And in our team,
every times we meet conflicts. We focus on our collaboration first. For getting
high performance collaboration, we pay attention on everything we can do to
build high level of mutual trust in our team. These are what I have learned in
Frank’s class and I think I will utilize them in my future life and work.
REFERENCE
1.
Charlene Solomon. (2012).The challenges of working in
virtual teams—Virtual Teams Survey Report. RW-3 Culture Wizard
2.
Fiedler,
F. E. & Chemers, M. M. (1974). Leadership and effective management.
Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman
(2004). Effective teamwork. Constructing
excellence
