Module Assignment- Case Study

Edwards, A. and Wilson J. (2014). Implementing Virtual Teams. Gower Publishing, Oxon, GBR. (Read Part I on When We Should Use Virtual Teams and Part II What We Need to Know When Implementing Virtual Teams.)

Berry, G. (2011). Enhancing effectiveness of Virtual Teams, Journal of Business Communications, 186206.

Sembdner, Stephan (2011). Success Factors of Virtual Teams in the Conflict of CrossCultural Team Structures, Diplomica Verlag: Hamburg Germany. (Read Chapter 2 and 3).

Here is a great video full of ideas and recommendations, usually claiming to have been derived from practice but not always carefully documented as such.

(You aren't expected to read every item in all of these, but you ought to review a fair sample of the material in order to get a good idea of the kinds of advice propositions being offered.)

Your task is to identify 3 to 5 significant questions regarding the management of virtual teams that relate to "practice wisdom" advice found in the readings, that you believe are sufficiently important that good quality research might help resolve their validity. Trivial questions don't really warrant research, because the research costs money and other resources that are in scarce supply. We want to reserve our research resources to address those questions that really seem important to practice-particularly issues where the practice wisdom might be divided, with one group saying one set of things and one group another, or where there is no advice available at all. So what you're looking for in the blogs are situations where advice seems to contradict other advice, or where advice given seems to contradict your own intuition or common sense, or otherwise where ambiguity seems to exist. The two systematic research studies will give you an idea of how such research might be done.

When you identify some topic of interest, you should be able to specify:

The research question itself; what are we trying to find out?

Why is this question interesting? Who might care what the results would be?

Where might we do such a study? How might we carry it out? (Please note: You're not being assessed here on the quality of your research expertise; just give us some general ideas about how you think we might answer your question.)

What would you expect the results to be?

Any other thoughts or ideas you might have regarding this research issue. So your paper is to consist of your thoughts on these questions regarding each of the 3 to 5 issues that you have been able to identify from your perusal of the readings of virtual teams.

Thus, when you have read through the articles and related material, compose a 4-6 page critical analysis paper as outlined above, on the topic:

Three to five significant ideas about the management of virtual teams that could be usefully assessed by conducting systematic organizational research.