Role of Manager in Geographically Distributed Team; A Review

Abstract

Geographically Distributed Team is a team where members are dispersed in different locations across the globe and collaborate together to achieve a common goal. Such kind of team have the characteristics of both virtual team and global team. The team members work from far flung locations and relying heavily on computer mediated communication tools to interact and to collaborate with each other. The members work in different time zones and are culturally diverse. Managing such distributed team requires a different set of competence than a collocated team. The team leader or manager not only have to manage a team who may have never met or worked with each other before but also have different cultural orientation, working style, values and behaviours. This paper reviews research studies highlighting the managerial challenges of geographically distributed teams as faced by team leaders/ managers and also discuss managerial roles and behaviours that have been found to be effective in overcoming those challenges and to build an effective distributed team.

Leadership behaviour that facilitates shared leadership emergence in internationally dispersed non-formal teams

“…The second expectation that emerged from the results is that the leader must align the team towards a goal by sharing the 'big picture' and by helping the team to understand the benefits for them. This finding is also linked to research question one and is supported by several authors who define various iterations of common goal orientation that are important for shared leadership in teams (Hoegl & Muethel, 2016;Nederveen Pieterse et al, 2019;Nordbäck & Espinosa, 2019;Seshadri & Elangovan, 2019;Sweeney et al, 2019;Wu et al, 2020;Zhu et al, 2018).…”

“…Members of internationally dispersed teams face obvious practical challenges when attempting to engage in quality exchanges with their fellow-team members. The literature supports the view that high-quality leader-member exchanges become more difficult to facilitate as dispersion increases (Hoch & Kozlowski, 2014;Seshadri & Elangovan, 2019). The discussion of the findings of the third research question builds on the premise that high-quality exchanges between the leader and the team members increase members' inclination to engage in leadership behaviour (Zhu et al, 2018).…”

“…The members of non-formal teams who were interviewed advocated that the non-formal leaders should be deliberate about building trust by taking structured action, actively displaying trust and displaying and encouraging openness. The importance of trust is supported by several authors who identified trust as an antecedent of shared leadership (Klasmeier & Rowold, 2020;Lyndon et al, 2020;Seshadri & Elangovan, 2019;Sweeney et al, 2019;Zhu et al, 2018).…”

“…In another study conducted by Lyndon, Pande and Navare (2020), cognitive trust was found to support the emergence of shared leadership in teams. Seshadri and Elangovan (2019) emphasise the importance of building trust in globally dispersed teams to support sharing of information between members and to achieve increased performance. The importance of trust between members of dispersed (virtual) teams is emphasised by Breuer, Hüffmeier and Hertel (2016), who found that trust has a positive influence on team performance, with this positive influence being more pronounced in virtual teams than in physical teams.…”

“…The results show that members feel un-empowered when they feel that their context is different or when their individual needs are not acknowledged. This places significant emphasis on this reoccurring theme of a shared vision and common purpose, which was identified in the literature as an antecedent of shared leadership (Hoegl & Muethel, 2016;Nederveen Pieterse et al, 2019;Nordbäck & Espinosa, 2019;Seshadri & Elangovan, 2019;Sweeney et al, 2019;Wu et al, 2020;Zhu et al, 2018).…”