Deck 11: The New Teams: Virtual, Global, Connected, and Self-Managing

Question 1

___ "is conceptualized as an individual's intrinsic motivation and specific self-efficacy to engage in cross-cultural experiences and master its nuances."

Answer 1

motivational cultural intelligence

Question 2

This chapter states that common forces are shaping the nature of teams, how team members will interact, potential team benefits and challenges, and other team processes and outcomes. It suggests that there is a convergence of mutually reinforcing developments that will be increasingly vital and symbiotic. As such, globalization, use of group collaborative technology and virtual teams, and self-management seem inextricably linked. Do you feel such a convergence is either probable or desirable?

Answer 2

Answers may, of course, vary. One question posed is whether such a convergence is desirable. Students may take either position as long as they provide adequate justification. The chapter suggests that common forces are shaping the various trends and that, except in the unlikely case that those trends will reverse, further convergence will occur. To the contrary, some students may argue that the various trends are, either singly or in concert, likely to become less relevant (arguments and evidence to this effect will be important in the answer) Beyond that, students are likely to differ in their views of the desirability of such a convergence. Some may view the convergence of elements as synergistic in their positive impacts. To the contrary, others may see any such convergence as dangerous. Such a position may be based on concerns about particular facets involved in the convergence and/or about the dangers of the mutually-reinforcing aspects of the convergence. Whichever position is taken - and both could appropriately be argued - the key issue is whether students provide strong arguments for their positions that reflect full knowledge of the chapter's contents.

Question 3

Identify and define five things that ThinkTank and other GDSS address (as noted by GroupSystems CEO and President Luis Solis)

Answer 3

1. Discovery. Uncovering who knows what, who knows whom, and who knows how to do tasks or projects better, anywhere in the world and outside the native organization.
2. Ideation. Generating ideas and ways to innovate, grow, and solve problems, thus projecting the possibilities for the future.
3. Teaming. Converging on a few important choices or possibilities that the group may be capable of further developing and supporting.
4. Leading. Achieving high levels of consensus by means of voting group members are confident that their voices have been heard, their votes counted, and that an effective voting methodology was employed.
5. Learning. Documenting group work or group memory for subsequent work for members unable to attend work sessions, or for inclusion in other materials.

Question 4

Briefly discuss five potential difficulties in geographically diverse teams resulting from culture clashes on the basis of Hofstede's dimensions.

Question 5

Identify and describe six patterns of collaboration identified by collaboration engineering (CE)

Question 6

Give six benefits of using a Group Decision Support System for brainstorming, relative to traditional brainstorming.

Question 7

Specify seven challenges associated with virtual teams.

Question 8

Specify six leadership practices of virtual team leaders.

Question 9

Identify seven (of the ten) guidelines for behavioral self-management.

Question 10

For decades, many people have questioned attempts to use learning theory to motivate employees. Now, some people are raising similar concerns about company efforts to teach employees behavioral self-management. They reason that, ""It's bad enough that we try to drive employees to work beyond their limits. Now we're teaching them to push themselves. Where will it all end?"" Do you agree? Why or why not?

Question 11

An executive says, "I'm going to do all I can to resist use of virtual teams in my company. They cause all sorts of problems. They depersonalize interactions and turn team members into automatons, sitting at computers and talking to computers. I don't want to put myself or my employees in such an inhumane environment."

Question 12

___ teams are defined as "globally dispersed, culturally diverse, and technologically connected individuals who work interdependently with a limited lifespan of membership in order to accomplish a common goal."

Question 13

Teams can develop opportunity thinking as opposed to obstacle thinking. This is an example of ___ aspects of team self-leadership.

Question 14

Daniel Power, the team scholar interviewed in this chapter, discussed individual and group ___.

Question 15

With global teams it is important to give not just a realistic team preview but also a realistic ___ preview.

Question 16

With ___ humans and robots directly interact.

Question 17

The ___ contract was an implied contract between the employee and the organization; the employee would be loyal and work hard, and the company would provide rewards and security.

Question 18

A ___ is defined as a network-based facility and organizational entity that spans distance; supports rich and recurring human interaction oriented to a common research area; fosters contact between researchers who are both known and unknown to each other, and provides access to data sources, artifacts, and tools needed to accomplish research tasks.

Question 19

___ refers to cumulative changes in the way Web pages are developed and used. Such a site may let users interact and collaborate in a social media dialogue as creators in a virtual community.

Question 20

LeafHopper, Pin the Tail on the Donkey, RichRelations, StrawPoll, and MoodRing are all examples of ___.

Question 21

Identify and define three types of new office forms.

Question 22

Identify and define two forms of self-management.

Question 23

The managerial interventions of setting individual accountabilities, completion dates, and schedules is especially important at the norming stage of the team life cycle.

Question 24

ThinkTank, while popular in academic circles, has found little use in practice.

Question 25

At the Nerdery, a fast-growing tech agency on Inc. Magazine's Hire Power Awards list discussed in the "TEAMS IN THE NEWS: Abandoning Job Titles at the Nerdery," the decision to do away with traditional job titles in favor of Co-Presidents titles for all employees was quickly abandoned after chaos and customer complaints.

Question 26

Someone saying, "I will exercise before dinner rather than after" is presented as an example of the "reorder behavior" step of behavioral self-management.

Question 27

ThinkTank is as an example of a Group Decision Support System.

Question 28

The idea that "nothing ensures but change" is relatively new; until the early twentieth century change was not seen as necessarily enduring or inevitable.

Question 29

With self-management, "do your best" goals should be set for behavioral change.

Question 30

The movement in organizations toward what has been called self-organization - freeing employees to figure out how to get the job done without central planning or control - assumes that employees will have the skills to proactively deal with workplace uncertainties and demands.

Question 31

The traditional emphasis on a bureaucratic hierarchy with clear lines of authority and strict deference to those at higher levels has generally been eroded.

Question 32

Which of the following is not true of team collaborative technology?

A)Especially with large groups, electronic brainstorming teams have been shown to outperform the aggregated output of individuals generating ideas individually.
B)A challenge is that when virtual teams are using group decision support tools, various members may have difficulty deciding which tools to use.
C)thinkLets can be used only in the last two stages of the problem solving process.
D)Collaboration engineering is essentially a replacement for a human facilitator.
E)None of the above.

Question 33

Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) are a subset of the broader category of group support software and tools known as:

A)forming
B)storming
C)norming
D)performing
E)none of the above

Question 34

Identify three characteristics of virtual teams.

Question 35

In what stage of the team life cycle would training on conflict resolution be most important?

A)forming
B)storming
C)norming
D)performing
E)none of the above

Question 36

In which of the following culture types may team members be especially uncomfortable using relatively impersonal forms of communications in virtual teams?

A)high context
B)high power distance
C)individualistic
D)low context
E)none of the above

Question 37

Which of the following is not true of virtual teams?

A)Any social loafing that occurs may be a result of dehumanization.
B)Researchers have developed a holographic 3D videoconferencing system that provides a 3D holographic image of another person.
C)Team members in one time zone may chafe at having to wait for inputs or responses from their distant team members.
D)Virtual teams must strive to develop swift trust.
E)none of the above

Question 38

Which of the following are sometimes referred to as virtual research environments?

A)thinkLets
B)collaboratories
C)facilitator-in-a-box
D)holodecks
E)none of the above

Question 39

Which of the following is not presented in the chapter as an element of the changing environment of teams?

A)enhanced globalization
B)growing computer literacy
C)increased focus on hierarchy
D)increased rate of change
E)none of the above

Question 40

Which of the following is not true of trust in global teams?

A)With global teams, the nature and meaning of trust may vary across cultures.
B)In countries that have strong institutional systems to govern business relationships, personal trust plays a secondary role.
C)Americans trust strangers less than do Japanese.
D)In the case of virtual global teams the impact of cultural differences on trust is amplified.
E)None of the above.

Question 41

Which of the following is not true of self-management?

A)Self-management is the process of managing oneself.
B)Self-management may be less expensive than reliance on organizational reward-and-control systems.
C)There are two broad approaches to self-management.
D)Self-management skills are transferable across a vast array of tasks and settings.
E)None of the above.

Question 42

While increasingly popular, self-management procedures have received very little empirical support.