Loss of identity and distinction could be one reason workers
fear virtuality.
future
of teleworking virtual teams--all sharing ideas, developing products, and coordinating
projects without ever meeting their teammates in person--has yet to arrive, much like the
vaunted paperless office.
Even in the world's most technologically interconnected societies, telecommuting is not
as widespread among twenty-first-century infotech workers as pundits have been predicting
for some three decades. A recent study reports that only 4% of Finnish workers said they
were performing telework (defined as work done at home under an employment contract);
another 4% had tried telework. But more than 90% said they had never even experimented
with it.
The need for a live, physical connection with collaborators may be why working
"virtually" is so unpopular, suggest researchers conducting the study at the
University of Tampere Department of Sociology and Social Psychology. They also fault
old-fashioned management attitudes that prevent organizations from instituting changes
that could save on office overhead and workers' commuting time.
But workers may have another fear: loss of identity and distinction. One price of
working in a team is the need to surrender your unique ideas into a group's intellectual
identity, according to a study by scholars at Stanford Graduate School of Business and
elsewhere. In a virtual team, your contributions may be deposited into a database,
becoming the property of the organization. If your hard-earned experience, knowledge, and
wisdom can no longer be traced directly to you, what future do you have in the Knowledge
Economy?
"It's a real fear," says Margaret Neale, one of the study's authors.
"Technology has the potential to destabilize the relationship between organizations
and employees."
Similarly, because virtual workers and teleworkers are isolated from their colleagues,
they lose opportunities to benefit from other people's ideas and experience and hence to
replenish their own intellectual reservoirs, says Neale. Thus, while technology enables
them to disseminate information to each other and the organization quickly, virtual
teams are less able to transfer implicit knowledge.
The researchers recommend several strategies for improving the effectiveness of virtual
teams, such as using advanced video conferencing and groupware, setting up mentoring
programs, and encouraging members to attend conferences.
Sources: University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland 33014. Web site www.uta.fi.
Stanford Graduate School of Business, 518 Memorial Way, Stanford University, Stanford,
California 94305. Web site www.gsb.stanford.edu.
