The Case Assignment for this module involves your analysis of what is known, somewhat known, not known, or “known but wrong” in the area of the management of virtual teams. Since this phenomenon has become the norm, more knowledge on managing these teams is needed. Most of the advice about virtual teams comes from one or more of four types of sources:

• The small number of academically respectable research studies on virtual teams
• The very large body of research done on the management of teams generally (dating back to the 1930s and of somewhat questionable generalizability  due to differences in tools, culture, society, and just about everything else)
• The modest but steadily increasing body of informal or “practice wisdom” information, generally made available through blogs or other Internet sources
• The quite large body of essentially uninformed but ready-to-be-shared opinion about the topic, also Internet-available

The first two bodies of information are generally easy to identify and distinguish; they’ll be found in academic journals, conference transactions, and other such sources. Unfortunately, distinguishing between the latter two types of information is much more complicated, since they may look a great deal like each other, depending on the technical abilities of the respective website designers.

Mortensen, M., & Hadley C. (2020). How to prepare your virtual teams for the long haul. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2020/05/how-to-prepare-your-virtual-teams-for-the-long-haul

Alexander, A., De Smet, A., & Mysore, M. (2020). Reimagining the post pandemic workforce. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/reimagining-the-postpandemic-workforce#

CNA Insider. (2020, November 4). Building a digital-ready workforce in the post-pandemic world | CNA Leadership Summit [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/EEqA7Of0uOY

UNC Kenan Institute. (2020, April 9). Remote offices, virtual teams and the future of work through and beyond COVID-19 [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/DUnzIglWuhQ

dottotech. (2020, April 8). Zoom security and privacy: Protect your meetings and yourself [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/-_mgnmmCv2M

In addition, the optional readings expand on many of the central points; you may also want to do some independent research of your own to clarify any issues that concern you.

Your task is to identify 4 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 4 to 5 issues that you have been able to identify from your perusal of the readings of virtual teams.

Case Assignment

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

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

As we said, your research recommendations need to be supported by the literature and the evidence. Obviously, as noted below, this will obligate you to actually be able to present such evidence in an academically respectable manner.