Background It is evident that due to the globalization, offshoring and cross-national collaboration has become a natural evolution for many companies which have created the virtual world. The virtual world has many advantages, but when this is put into practice it turns out that there are also some disadvantages that affect the teams that are working with different sites. Teams face big challenges in communication and collaboration due to the physical distance, cultural differences and time zones. While believing that the work becomes more efficient, this process is at the same time slowed down due to the challenges that arise that affects the performance which in turn affects the costs. Purpose The purpose of this study is to develop an understanding about whether or not there are differences in globally distributed teams and co-located teams in terms of soft factors, team performance and cost efficiency. The projects that will be studied are global software development projects where the teams are either located in Sweden or in India. Method This study is a case study at Ericsson that operates in many distributed software development projects where team members are located all over the world. 11 projects were selected and compared. Two surveys were made in order to collect data from developers who worked with the different projects that were selected. Furthermore, internal data about the performance for each project were collected and used in the statistical tests together with data from the survey in SPSS. The performance data was also used in order to calculate the performance deviations from the expected performance and in order to calculate the associated costs. Results There is a statistically significant difference in communication efficiency, shared identity, trust and cultural clashes between co-located and distributed teams. These soft factors are strongly related to the team performance. The co-located teams perform better than expected while distributed teams perform worse than expected which also increase the extra costs in the project. Conclusion The communication efficiency, shared identity and trust are higher in co-located teams, and the values of cultural clashes are lower than in distributed teams. Co-located teams perform better than distributed teams and the performance in co-located teams leads to cost savings while the performance in distributed teams leads to cost losses.

Today’s fast-paced and global market has added pressure on firm’s to constantly strengthen their competitive advantage. Over the last couple of years, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have become an increasingly used strategy for firms to acquire resources that cannot be developed internally. However, M&As often fail to achieve the initial purpose. The purpose of this study was to investigate two research questions; RQ1: What are the effects on employees in a newly created multicultural team that is the outcome of a merger between two firms? and RQ2: How can managers manage these effects, in order to create a successful team integration?To gain understanding of the phenomena, and their respective connections, qualitative research has been conducted. Through a multiple case study design, and data collection in the form of interviews, empirical data was obtained. In total eight interviews were conducted with individuals originating from different roles and acquired firms. Their experiences and emotions were later analysed through thematic analysis and coding.The findings of this study add an additional layer to the conclusions of previous studies within the area of multicultural team integration, post-acquisition. Well-communicated integration strategies have been deemed important; this study confirms that statement. However, the findings of this study provide evidence that transparency should be considered an important dimension of the communication strategy, in order to increase employee satisfaction.

The advancements in technology have enabled contemporary organisations to work remotely, and this work structure is increasingly being adopted by more industries. This forces organisations to implement global virtual teams, that despite differences in geographic locations, time zones and cultures, are obligated to work towards organisational goals. It is possible to identify both opportunities and challenges for leaders within organisations. These can be viewed from various organisational perspectives, although one of the most recurring topics for leaders to consider when managing global virtual teams, is the notion of ​trust. ​Trust is argued to be one of the fundamental constituents for teams to work effectively. Even though the use of global virtual teams is becoming more prevalent, research on trust in regard to virtual teams is limited. Prior research argues that leadership is the key success factor for determining the level of trust in global virtual teams. 

    However, there is a research gap on specifically how leaders work in terms of the specific actions that are taken in order to facilitate for establishing trust. This case study therefore investigates how leaders establish trust in their geographically dispersed virtual teams. 

In order to answer this research question, nine leaders were interviewed through qualitative in-depth semi-structured interviews.

As education evolves, leadership processes change. The concept of a single senior leader, with siloed divisions often providing direction, is transforming into a team-based culture. While there is substantive research on school-site leadership, research is limited on how the central organization impacts the system. It identified individual leadership characteristics but had not adequately addressed impact of a senior leadership team. This study addresses the concept of senior leadership teams with divisions and executives working collaboratively. It identifies characteristics of effective leadership teams to explore how they can be successfully created and sustained; and it investigates the senior leader’s role in, and what factors and methods can be replicated to sustain, team effectiveness. Four organizations participated: one school district, one government agency and two for-profit organizations. Twenty-five senior leaders and team members completed a DiSC and Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team assessment; a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis; and a hiring values survey. All were interviewed individually and as a group, and the structured and semi-structured instruments were chosen to explore group characteristics in such a way that the data would point to replicable information. Study elements, coupled with my expertise in team development and leadership, allowed me to critically consider data and identify three emerging themes. While aspects of these themes have been previously identified, they have not been linked as a pathway to creating and sustaining effective teams as a route to organizational excellence leading to student achievement. First, there is a strong relation between the factors of team culture, membership, and expectations and engagement as a foundation of an effective team. Second, crucial team management and engagement methods were identified as key to long-term sustainability. Third, the senior leader’s impact is significant to team success based on team leadership style and methodology. A paradigm emerged changing traditional leadership hierarchy to a new dynamic of leading from the center. The research indicates that deliberately designing teams may have greater potential for success and long-term effectiveness. Further research is encouraged to address issues relating to virtual teams and identify successful strategies in team building and implementation. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2019. / Humanities Education / PhD / Unrestricted

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Social loafing is a growing concern for modern organizations. With advancement in computer technology, virtual tools are used more frequently to communicate, which may allow social loafing to occur in new and unfamiliar forms. The intent of this thesis is to examine social loafing through the use of virtual tools, and to analyze whether collective orientation has a moderating influence on the relationship between social loafing and virtuality. 30 teams, each containing four participants, were randomly assigned to a condition of virtuality (i.e., instant messaging or videoconferencing). Participants then completed a computer simulation task in which social loafing, collective orientation of the team, and team performance were measured.

Trust is gaining attention for its benefits to both teams and organizations as a whole (Fulmer & Gelfand, 2012). The difficulty of building it in comparison to the ease of destroying it calls for a deeper understanding of trust, as well as its relationship with critical team outcomes (Colquitt, LePine, Piccolo, Zapata, & Rich, 2012). Unfortunately, current research has progressed in a disjointed manner that requires the integration of findings before a more parsimonious and descriptive understanding of trust at the team-level can be developed. Beyond this basic understanding, research is needed to explore the nature of trust in teams comprised of diverse members, as multi-national, multi-cultural, and interdisciplinary teams are increasingly characterizing the modern landscape. Thus, this article uses meta-analytic techniques to examine the extent to which mutual trust can serve as an underlying mechanism that drives the diversity-team performance relationship. First, surface-level and deep-level diversity characteristics varied in their impact on trust. Value diversity emerged as the most detrimental, along with the moderating effect of time. Second, 95 independent samples comprising 5,721 teams emphasized the importance of trust to team performance with a moderate and positive relationship. Third, mediation analyses answered recent calls (e.g., van Knippenberg & Schippers, 2007) to examine underlying mechanisms that can explain the diversity-outcomes relationship. This showed age, gender, value, and function diversity to be related to performance through mutual trust. Furthermore, this study explores whether contextual (e.g., team distribution) as well as measurement (e.g., referent) issues pose systematic differences in the diversity-trust and trust-performance relationships. Surprisingly, the construct of trust at the team-level proved to be generalizable across a number of unique conditions. In addition to this extensive quantitative review, implications and future research are discussed.

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