In this class, there is a significant amount of teamwork. You can best accomplish this work by getting off to a good start as a team—getting to know one another and establishing a sense of group identification, group norms, and trust. Norms include expectations regarding communication, how you would like to deal with conflict, what grades your group is collectively aiming for, and the like.
Read the assigned article “Creating and Sustaining Trust in Virtual Teams” (2007). As a group, explore the issues presented in the article, particularly “swift trust” and how your team can achieve it. Also, as a team, come up with and implement a team-building exercise. (The article gives you some ideas, which you may use, or you may come up with an idea of your own.)
You can think of your team-building exercise as a piece of technology. We typically think of technology as a system of rules or procedures for acting on the material world (for example, transforming iron ore into steel), but technology can also apply to humans. For example, psychotherapy may be thought of as a technology, as it is a system of practices and techniques that act upon people to effect positive change. A team-building technology would simply be any type of structure that you impose upon your interaction patterns.
In face-to-face classes, instructors often divide students into teams for part of their coursework. During their first team meeting, members are sometimes instructed to spend 15 minutes getting to know one another. With these instructions alone, members tend to sit around chatting about whatever they feel like. As a general rule, they do what feels safe. This is not fruitless, but we can do better by imposing some form of “technology”—any technique for structuring the interaction.
Working in virtual teams is particularly hard, and there may be a tendency to just do the minimum that it takes to get the deliverable part of the assignment done. This would be far from ideal. If you take this assignment seriously, it will help your team be truly effective, which will in turn assist you in performing better in the remaining team-based assignments in this course. Groups that bond well and develop trust perform better in the long run.
While you need to take this seriously, don’t get too bogged down in process. Spend a set amount of time in idea generation (brainstorming). Then implement. Then write it up!
Deliverable: You should produce a 450- to 500-word document on
- how much real trust you feel exists in your group,
- how your group sought to develop trust, and
- what your team-building exercise was.
Demonstrate that you read the article and that your group engaged in a serious and honest attempt to come together as a virtual team. Be authentic; if you feel your attempted exercise fell short, or if you still experience some degree of tentativeness regarding trust, that is fine. (please put #words in parenthesis at end of document).
Your paper will need to be posted in two places. Please upload it here as an assignment, so that your instructor can assign your team a grade. Also, please post your team paper in the Lesson 1 Discussion: Virtual Team Building forum (as a post not an attachment) so that other class members have the opportunity to view your team’s process and progress.
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