Why are Virtual Teams Perfect for Marketing?

36TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ORGANIZATIONAL SCIENCE DEVELOPMENT: RESPONSIBLE ORGANIZATION O. Arsenijević, M. Ferjan, I. Podbregar, P. Šprajc, D. Trivan & Y. Ziegler

Why are Virtual Teams Perfect for Marketing? GORAN VUKOVIČ, MIHA MARIČ & GAŠPER JORDAN 69

Abstract In order to keep in step with the fast changing business world, organizations have to use all possibilities available to get advantage against competition. The use of technology is inevitable nowadays and it definitely gives the edge to organizations. When we talk about working teams, we generally have in mind a traditional face-to-face team. The use of technology gives organizations a possibility for team creation, of which members are dislocated, they do not interact in person between each other and they collaborate only by use of technology – they can create virtual teams. By that, we can get together different professional from all around the world who can generate knowledge, skills together with abilities to accomplish a given task. Virtual teams are increasing within different industries, because with them the organizations can get positive effects due to lower wages, cut of office space costs, decreased travel expenses, improved productivity, timing effectiveness, higher response speed and enhancing quality aspects of work. Furthermore, we believe they are perfect for marketing and we give recommendations for practical implications. Keywords: HRM • marketing • virtual teams

CORRESPONDENCE ADDRESS: Goran Vukovič, Ph.D., Full Professor, University of Maribor, Faculty of Organizational Sciences, Kidričeva cesta 55a, 4000 Kranj, Slovenia, e-mail: [email protected]; Miha Maričm, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, University of Maribor, Faculty of Organizational Sciences, Kidričeva cesta 55a, 4000 Kranj, Slovenia, e-mail: [email protected], Gašper Jordan, University of Maribor, Faculty of Organizational Sciences, Kidričeva cesta 55a, 4000 Kranj, Slovenia, e-mail: [email protected]. DOI https://doi.org/10.18690/978-961-286-020-2.103 ISBN 978-961-286-020-2 © 2017 University of Maribor Press Available at: http://press.um.si.

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36TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ORGANIZATIONAL SCIENCE DEVELOPMENT: RESPONSIBLE ORGANIZATION (MARCH 22ND - 24TH, 2017, PORTOROŽ, SLOVENIA) G. Vukovič, M. Marič & G. Jordan: Why are Virtual Teams Perfect for Marketing?

Introduction

Collaborative work environments and team-based structures are commonly used across different types of organizations (Webber & Webber, 2015). Virtual team (VT) functions independently of organizational boundaries, geographical locations, and time zones while striving effectively to reach the team-specific goals (Haines, 2014; Snellman, 2014). VTs are more widespread than ever, because advances in technology have made it easier to organize and manager dispersed groups of people (DeRosa & Lepsinger, 2010). The competitive pressures in the business world and the need of today’s global market workforce have made virtual teams a necessity for many organizations, so for that reason many companies are using VTs to reach business objectives (DeRosa & Lepsinger, 2010; Mukherjee, Lahiri, Mukherjee & Billing, 2012). Information and communication technologies (ICT) helped at the VT creation, a new type of working team (Duran & Popescu, 2014). The ICT can consist of e-mail, telephony, instant messaging, and, in more sophisticated forms, videoconferencing, shared workspaces, and group decision support systems (Haines, 2014). VTs are used by different organizations for increasing efficiency in vast activities domains, such as research and development, knowledge management, learning and training, manufacturing, marketing and others (Duran & Popescu, 2014). There are some obvious VTs’ advantages: people no longer have to work in the same place, participants can be involved in task attendance from any location around the globe, in any moment of day or night (Duran & Popescu, 2014). Because VTs break the time and space barriers, can also utilizes at maximum the members experience from the organization (Duran & Popescu, 2014). Taking into consideration such characteristics, VTs have a huge potential for improving the organizational efficiency (Duran & Popescu, 2014), because of that, VTs are becoming more and more important and continuing to grow in popularity (Olariu & Aldea, 2014). Consequently, VTs can more easily respond to the changing requirements of the environment by making use of the latest knowledge, and adaptable working arrangements, and by taking advantage of increased application of information and communication technologies (Snellman, 2014). The new technologically mediated working arrangements require new leadership approaches that may explain how leadership is best practiced in virtual environment and what kind of leaders make VTs succeed (Snellman, 2014). 2

Virtual teams

As a result of the ever evolving concept of VTs, there is not even one common definition for it (Chen & Messner, 2010; Schweitzer & Duxbury, 2010). Positive facts of implementing the VTs are in overcoming geographical and time boundaries (Fuller, Marett & Twitchell, 2012); profits due to lower wages (Hunsaker & Hunsaker, 2008); the cut of office space costs, and decreased travel expenses (Schweitzer & Duxbury, 2010); improved productivity (Chen & Messner, 2010); timing effectiveness and higher

36. MEDNARODNA KONFERENCA O RAZVOJU ORGANIZACIJSKIH ZNANOSTI: ODGOVORNA ORGANIZACIJA (22. - 24. MAREC 2017, PORTOROŽ, SLOVENIJA) G. Vukovič, M. Marič & G. Jordan: Why are Virtual Teams Perfect for Marketing?

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response speed (Gressgård, 2011), and enhancing quality aspects of the work (Gignac, 2005). In addition, they get structures that are more flexible and agile in the organizational processes (Algesheimer, Dholakia & Gurău, 2011). With the VTs, organizations have an access to a comprehensive pool of dislocated skilled personnel with a variety of qualifications (Kirkman, Rosen, Gibson, Tesluk & McPherson, 2002) resulting in better creativity and more innovations (Gibson & Vermeulen, 2003). Some studies opined that implementing VTs for an organization could mean shifting from failure to success (Duarte & Snyder, 2006). On the contrary, any negligence in recognizing, addressing and taking appropriate measures to resolve the inherent challenges of any VT will jeopardize the efforts and investments by any organization to adopt them (Ebrahim, Ahmed & Taha, 2009). The challenges in implementing the VTs could be regarded as the main disadvantages of utilizing them, which might end up with the project manager in having teams with less effectiveness and facing much more unknown risks than their conventional counterparts (Chen & Messner, 2010; DeRosa & Lepsinger, 2010). Organizations that proactively take steps to support virtual team as well as periodically assess their effectiveness will see a much better return on investment. Therefore, they have to be focused on the crucial categories for assembling VT, due to their direct impact on VT’s effectiveness (DeRosa & Lepsinger, 2010):     3

team composition; communication; training and, team leadership. How to build VTs in marketing

Team composition VTs should have a core group of members whose membership did not fluctuate frequently, because it can lead to a confusion “who is on the team” together with role ambiguity. If changes occur less frequently, the VTs will have a greater stability and more time for members to build productive work relationships (DeRosa & Lepsinger, 2010). We recommend the same number of team members for VTs, which is commonly used for “normal” teams, and that is between five and nine. VTs can still be bigger if so, but then members often create subgroups, which can paralyse VT’s functioning. Therefore, it is much easier if we create smaller teams, which can collaborate. Another matter, which we have to be aware of is, that team members should not be cross functional. That means that in marketing VT, we have to combine different specialist from marketing (e. g., sale persons, specialists for digital marketing, specialist for

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telephone marketing) to get best results possible. Because specialist or “best ones in the game” are not often in one location, we believe VTs are perfect solution to solve this issue. Team roles Belbin’s (1981, 2012) model of team roles has been used extensively in organizations and research as a typology of teamwork behaviour and work group effectiveness. The Belbin Team Role Self-Perception Inventory (1981, 1993), has become widely known and utilized for selection of individuals into teams (Anderson & Sleap, 2004). Belbin (2012) defined nine team roles: plant, resource investigator, co-ordinator, shaper, monitor evaluator, teamworker, implementer, complete finisher, and specialist. Communication Communication in organization and its structures is situated in time and space (Ocasio, Loewenstein & Nigam, 2015). One of the main and hardest to achieve factors, which is a result of good relationships between team members and can enhance the effectiveness of the VTs, is trust (DeRosa & Lepsinger, 2010). Research shows that VTs with high degrees of trust are more proactive, more taskfocused, more optimistic, more frequently initiate interactions, and provide more productive feedback (Clark, Clark, & Crossley, 2010). Team members have to trust their leaders, each other, and the organization to be effective, especially in the case of VTs (Chae, 2016; Gilson, Maynard, Young, Vartiainen, & Hakonen, 2015). Studies have shown that workers’ trust in others is impacted by their ability to observe directly what others are doing (Aubert & Kelsey, 2003; Clark, Clark & Crossley, 2010; Robert, Denis, & Hung, 2009), but some people are predisposed to trust because of their personalities or they can rely on the use of stereotypes to make initial judgments of trustworthiness (Ford, Piccolo & Ford, 2017). Due to this fact, virtual environments make it difficult, if not impossible, for team members to observe each other as the fine distinction of daily informal interactions and nonverbal communications are lost in webbased communications (Kasper-Fuehrer & Ashkanasy, 2001). Therefore, the organization, the leader, and team members must invent ways to be transparent with each other to build and sustain trust (Ford, Piccolo & Ford, 2017). The ability to collaborate in virtual environment relies heavily on extant trust among virtual members as knowledge sharing cannot occur freely without it (Tsai, Ma, Lin, Chiu & Chen, 2014). While the technology is the hardware of creating virtual trust, the actions of the involved in VTs are the software that builds and sustains the needed trust (Ford, Piccolo & Ford, 2017).


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Training Members have to develop skills, such as communication, interpersonal skills, collaboration skills, action planning, problem solving, and decision making. Firstly, you have to assess and choose those people, who have appropriate set of skills to work in VTs. Then it is better to choose targeted training over overall training. We have to provide necessary training before we launch VT, and then we can expect VT to perform well. We have to engage people, virtual training sessions are recommended. Members can work Team leadership There are evidences showing that around 50% of unsuccessful projects with VTs are the results of the manager's incompetency at working with VTs (Schweitzer & Duxbury, 2010). The main reason is that leaders use the same principals in VTs as they are used to do in “classic” teams (Ahuja, 2010). 4

Discussion and implications

VTs have grown in use in organizations to solve two key problems: (1) how to assemble an optimal array of human resources to solve problems that cross traditional teams, and (2) how to assemble teams that can address location-specific needs (Ford, Piccolo & Ford, 2017). It is of great importance to be in step with the technological development, because it can give organizations to get ahead against competition. In the first instance, organizations find that while they may have the human capabilities to address problems or take on tasks, these people are not co-located in one place, one building, or even in one organizational unit; they can be located in a variety of organizational or/as physical locations (Kirkman, Gibson, & Kim, 2012). Consequently, the only way to benefit from collective capabilities is to form a VT that can integrate and coordinate knowledge, skills, and abilities to accomplish a task (Ford, Piccolo & Ford, 2017). Complicating the management and effectiveness of these teams is the common situation that some or even all of the team members are not assigned fulltime to a particular project team, but instead have multiple projects reporting to several different managers (Cummings & Haas, 2012). VTs depend on having appropriate communication technology to connect and support the members in ways that develop trust and organizations show that they support the team and its mission by providing this technology (Ford, Piccolo & Ford, 2017). They can also consistently provide cues to the VTs, proving the organization is trustworthy (Ford, Piccolo & Ford, 2017). Specifically, the organization makes sure it assembles and sustains the best array of team members for the task, ensures that the team’s leader is competent and capable of managing VTs, provides training and technology to support the team, and carefully monitors the professional and emotional needs of its remotely located employees. In

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viewing these cues, VT members make determinations (as individuals and as a group) about whether the organization can be trusted (Ford, Piccolo & Ford, 2017). If trust is the glue that holds virtual teams together and ties them and their members to the organization’s mission, then developing strategies that focus on these trust-building cues is a crucial component of managing VTs (Ford, Piccolo & Ford, 2017). Therefore, fostering good teamwork, reducing uncertainty, and building successful relationships are particularly essential for successful collaboration in VTs (Chae, 2016). VTs with efficient communication can avoid the lack of team planning and eventually achieve team effectiveness (Berry, 2011).

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