Research on Global Teams

Introduction

What are the issues that global teams find most challenging? How can team effectiveness be increased to accelerate business performance? As corporate executives make global teamwork a key element in achieving their business objectives, the answers to these questions are increasingly important.

In recent study including 170 teams from fifteen organizations, we identified areas where teams are generally strongest and where they typically fall short. This newsletter summarizes a recent analysis of survey results and provides recommendations for helping teams work together more effectively to achieve business goals.

Team members who completed Meridian Resources' Global Teams Online survey* came from a variety of different functions: engineering, administrative, manufacturing, research & development, sales & marketing, senior executive, and staff (Finance, HR, Legal). Among the total of 1,737 survey respondents, the largest number came from North America, with substantial representation from Europe and Asia as well; a smaller number of participants were from Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. Although a number of different industries were represented, the great majority of teams were in high technology enterprises.

Survey Results: An Overview

The survey that participants completed contains thirty-six items in six dimensions. Team self-ratings highlighted the following items as areas of greatest team strength:

Areas of Greatest Team Strength

• Team members have the skills they need to accomplish their tasks.
• Team members effectively use email, voicemail and other virtual methods of communication.
• All members of the team share their own ideas openly during meetings.
• All members of the team are clear on their roles and responsibilities.
• The team's communication systems allow team members to receive the information they need on a regular, timely basis.

These results appear to hold some good news: team members feel a relatively high level of confidence in their use of virtual communication technologies and meeting facilitation techniques. Indeed, somewhat to our surprise, the two survey dimensions that scored the highest on average were Team Meetings and Virtual Communication.

Teams rated their own performance as weakest in the following areas:

Areas of Greatest Team Weakness

• The team has an effective decision-making process.
• Team members give and receive critical feedback in a constructive manner.
• The team has an effective procedure for resolving problems among team members.
• Each member of the team is willing to try new ideas offered by members from different cultures.
• There is a high level of trust among team members.

These lower-rated items reinforce the particular importance for global teams of dealing with different assumptions and ideas about work process — that is, how they can best carry out crucial tasks together. Decision-making, feedback, problem solving, and even the fundamental area of building trust among team members appear to require focused and sustained attention in a diverse team setting in order to ensure positive results. The two survey dimensions with the lowest overall team performance ratings were Team Process — which includes items such as decision-making and feedback — and Cultural Diversity, a category that examines the ability of teams to effectively leverage the different backgrounds of team members.

Gap Analysis: Senior Executives and "Other" Regions

An interesting result emerged when responses from different organizational functions were compared. Those who identified themselves as senior executives (71 respondents) were on average most critical of their global team's performance when compared with team members from other functions such as engineering, manufacturing, R&D, and so on. This was especially true in the areas of Virtual Communication, Cultural Diversity, and Team Process. One possible interpretation for this result is that senior executives, in contrast with project or product development teams, for example, have to accomplish tasks that require more high-stakes decisions and intensive negotiations on contentious issues. If this is in fact the case, then senior executives might benefit the most from experienced support and facilitation. (It could also be the case that senior executives are simply more used to being critical and therefore scored their teams lower.)

Comparisons between the different world regions that were represented yielded somewhat unexpected results as well. The responses of team members from North America (1,017), Europe (336), and Asia (212), actually followed one another fairly closely and displayed a surprising degree of agreement with regard to both team strengths and team weaknesses. However, the ratings from employees in the "Other" category (172), which includes respondents from Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa, were consistently lower than for different regions. This finding suggests that special focus is required to integrate team members who are from those areas in order to ensure that they can function as fully enfranchised participants.

Areas for Further Investigation

In addition to the statistical analysis summarized above, we have recently conducted formal interviews or coaching sessions with more than 150 team leaders in several companies. The most consistent finding from these discussions was that, although team leaders and their colleagues have become accustomed to virtual communication methods, they would advise others to convene a face-to-face meeting at the outset if at all possible. As one team leader remarked, "We recently had a face-to-face meeting after six months of working together, and we've gotten more done in the last two or three days than in the entire previous six months." In an era of tight budgets and widely dispersed teams the opportunities for direct personal contact are often limited; however, the starting point of team interactions appears to be the most critical time to invest in bringing team members together.

Another theme that emerged from our interviews is that members of global teams asked for more help with handling conflicts, both once friction among team members has started and even before it has begun. They suggested a number of creative best practices of their own that were born through trial and error. We have begun to collect and develop a number of these practices, which include methods for: returning to previous points of agreement, creating a picture of the whole system, examining stakeholder needs, analyzing conflicts at different levels to diffuse personal clashes, and discussing possible paths for constructive escalation.

We have also added a new Conflict Resolution dimension to the Global Teams Online survey, and will be looking closely at results for this expanded version. The revised model for the seven Global Teams Online dimensions is depicted below:

A MODEL FOR
GLOBAL TEAM EFFECTIVENESS

Summary: Recommendations for Global Teams

Companies that have made high-performing global teams part of their vision for corporate success have a major stake in ensuring that diverse team members work together successfully. Line managers and project leaders, as well as human resources or organization development professionals, are often on the firing line when it comes to making this happen. Based on the research findings described above, here are five recommendations for leaders, participants, and facilitators of global teams to keep in mind:

1. Apply sustained effort and attention to the difficult areas of decision-making, feedback, problem solving, building trust, and leveraging cultural diversity.
2. Offer experienced support to senior executives on global teams who face particularly tough decisions and contentious issues.
3. Carefully integrate team members from Latin America, the Middle East, or Africa who may otherwise feel marginalized.
4. If it is possible to invest in at least one face-to-face team meeting, plan to do this at the very start of the team's interactions.
5. Provide new strategies and resources to team members for resolving or avoiding conflicts.