Organizing the Virtual Organization

Wikipedia defines a 'virtual organization' as one that exists 'as a corporate, not-for-profit, educational or otherwise productive entity that does not have a central geographical location and exists solely through telecommunication tools'.  Since the 1990s, virtual organizations and teams have seemed like a panacea for a lot of problems that arise from RL collaboration (real estate, travel costs, time wasted commuting, etc. etc.), but there hasn't been all that much useful data on what makes a virtual organization or team work well, despite the fact that there are many that are majestic examples of virtual organization (and more notably, self-organization) that flourish beyond anyone's wildest expectations.  Likewise there have been horrible failures resulting from efforts to contrive a successful organization in a virtual setting (think of some of those horrible groupware experiments).  And while  I suppose there are those who might debate whether MMO play constitutes productive activity or not, it does seem clear that the skills one develops via participation in MMOs might be hugely relevant to other types of virtual organizations.

It came to my attention several years ago that some virtual organizations can be more efficient than ones where people meet face-to-face on a daily basis.  People who work away from other people tend to spend less time filling the day with idle chit chat, and as people only tend to interact when there's work to be done, the social fabric tends to be less affected by the evils of gossip, back-stabbing, and other icky stuff that arises when people need something to pad out their 8-hour workdays.  Not to mention, of course, that being able to go to work in bunny slippers makes employees way loyal.  But some seem to think that virtual teams are more challenging than ones that meet F2F.  I'm not sure I believe this.  I think a virtual team/organization can work just as well, if not better, providing that the participants have the requisite skills for the specific type of participation facilitated and challenged by virtual environments and distributed teams.  So how do people learn those skills?

Stanford's Summer Institute at Wallenburg Hall is offering a course this summer,  Building Effective Virtual Teams: Tools, Techniques, Best Practices, and 'Gotchas' for Creating and Leading Distributed Teams that guides managers through an ' intensive workshop' that focuses 'on distributed teams in multiple locations, especially off-shored or outsourced teams. New tools and methodologies as well as key research conclusions will be covered for what works and what has been awkward, difficult, or even disastrous'.  There is a mention of 'immersive environments' that facilitate (presumably productive) interaction.  Do they mean virtual worlds?  Some of the screenshots have a Second Life feel, that's for sure.  The problem, as I see it, is that virtual worlds tend to be much more loosely organized than virtual organizations that center around some sort of specific collaborative activity. Now we all know that MMOs can be rife with all the drama (and more!) that we might see in a RL workplace, but  I started thinking... what does the average MMO organization have in common with other virtual organizations?  In fact, can MMOs be a training ground for learning to function well in distributed workforces, telecommuting situations,  'loosely-coupled' business ecosystems, the open source movement, etc?

For those of us who have spent large portions of our careers participating in various online spaces and collaborating with others from afar (I, like many others, co-authored a book chapter with someone I have never met in person, and have also participated in various distributed projects with people I never see F2F),  it can be easy to take these skills for granted.   But what are  the things that are critical to being part of a distributed team?  We've talked about leadership and management skills before, but what about being a good participant/contributor? Here are a few critical skills I can think of...

Autonomy - this is the obvious one.  With no one looking over your shoulder (physically, at least), being able to work independently and being personally accountable are hugely important.

Communication - this facet demands literacy in a range of communication approaches.  Fluency in the intricacies of online commmunication, like text-based email, is even more important when that is the only modality through which co-workers experience someone.

Trust - engendering trust when one is out of sight and out of mind means developing a track record that demonstrates accountability and responsiveness.  A sensitivity to the importance of developing social capital can help increase one's awareness of how they are perceived by others, a factor that can help them manage their personal brand.

Flexibility – Moshowitz (1994) calls this ‘combinatorial freedom', referring to an ability to  take on  different roles as different needs arise.  From a management perspective, it means being comfortable hiring more generalized workers, and knowing how to identify and leverage a range of strengths.  Anyone who rolls combo characters like healer/damage dealers knows  exactly what this is all about.

Are there others?  I'm off to edit my resume. 

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Mowshowitz, A.  (1994). Virtual organization: A vision of management in the information age.  The Information Society, 10, 267-288.

Comments

[Lisa Galarneau]

1.

Ha! Just realized that Constance S. and David Simkins' OGDC talk is very relevant to this conversation! Stay tuned.

[Bart Stewart]

2.

I work in a fairly large enterprise full of virtual teams (I participated in a virtual team meeting just today). FWIW, my experience suggests that virtual teams work best when they're composed of people who by nature find this kind of structure congenial.

A book I've found enlightening on this subject is Charles Handy's Understanding Organizations. The virtual team would seem to be a natural fit for someone who's comfortable with what Handy classified as the Task Culture. As Handy described this culture (which he suggested could be represented as a "net"):

This culture is extremely adaptable. Groups, project teams, or task forces are formed for a specific purpose and can be reformed, abandoned, or continued. The net organization works quickly since each group ideally contains within it all the decision-making powers required. Individuals find in this culture a high degree of control over their work, judgement by results, easy working relationships within the group with mutual respect based on capacity rather than age or status.

C. Handy, Understanding Organizations 4th ed., p. 188

This gets slightly more interesting when compared to the other three cultures Handy perceived:

Power Culture (net): charismatic individuals exerting control through rings of influence

Role Culture (Greek temple): rule-managed hierarchies in stable environments

Person Culture (cluster): groups forming spontaneously to satisfy needs for individual expression

A virtual organization could be formed around any of these organizational styles. From what I've seen, however (at least in groups up to only around 40 people), they usually come into being to achieve some particular task, rather than being primarily a power source, a stable hierarchy, or followers of an individual.

Bigger virtual organizations might be a different story. It's certainly possible to start out as a Task Culture if that makes sense for the kind of work being done (e.g., a creative product development group), but I'd be surprised if organizations of 100 or more people remained virtual for very long. With increasing size comes an increasing tendency to turn into a more manageable Role Culture organization, where insuring that necessary work is being done properly means personally overseeing individuals to make sure they're following the standard processes.

WRT MMOs, I'd expect them to be dominated by Person groups (roleplayers following a particularly charismatic RPer) and Power groups that turn (usually with a lot of drama) into Role groups (guilds that become large guilds). Task-based groups? Not so much -- with the notable exception of ATITD -- since most MMOs simply aren't designed to offer large-scale creative activities that can be decomposed into tasks appropriate for small groups of players, which is the specialty of the Task Culture structure.

MMOs do however offer plenty of opportunities to exercise power (PvP), fill a role (tank/nuker/healer), or exercise individual expression (RPing).

There are other models of the organization that might help explain behaviors of groups in MMOs. I happen to think Handy's is especially interesting, but that's just me. :-)

--Bart

[Dan Schawbel]

3.

Moving your corporation online, means that it has to be consistent with your bricks-and-mortar Brand and with your Personal Brand. Social networks are tools for building a community around your organization.

www.personalbrandingblog.com

[Mikyo]

4.

That does seem exactly what we see in World of Warcraft. The difficulty of the transition to Role Culture is probably what keeps most guilds very small.

[Biggles]

5.

I've been getting fairly heavily involved in Acclaim's "TopSecret" project recently, and as such, any discussion about virtual organisation is rather interesting for me right now. There's a fair bit of conversation going on about the process and its shortcomings. I wonder if any other terranovians had had a look at "TopSecret" recently and what their thoughts were on the subject? Especially as the subject has now come up for discussion : )

My personal feeling is that the team's potential is still a long way from being fully exploited, mainly due to the nature of the process and the tools available. In particular, there has been a hestitance from the director and his immediate team to impose any of these cultures, rather I believe they are hoping that the optimal solution will simple emerge from the forum soup. Again, what do people think of emergent cultures? Is it better to encourage a particular form of group behaviour or to leave the group free to organise itself (and therefor also allow it to fail to do so)?

[Biggles]

6.

Oh, some links for those that are interested in TopSecret:

'Official' website:
http://www.videogameteam.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1

Wiki:
http://www.videogameteam.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Forum index:
http://phpbb.acclaim.com/topsecret/index.php

Sign up page:
http://topsecret.acclaim.com/

[Jeroen van Bree]

7.

In 2001 we interviewed members of virtual teams in twelve multinational organizations. We came up with a "pyramid of virtual team success" which included (from bottom to top): technology (especially support for informal and opportunistic interactions), setting objectives, competences (such as being results oriented), leadership (coaching and sensitivity), communication and establishing a team culture. I agree with you that virtual teams can be very efficient, as long as they take these aspects into consideration. However, the biggest problem we came across in these work settings is a lack of trust because of limited room for social aspects. The chit chat you mention as being absent in a virtual team serves the purpose of being the grease that makes a team work. I am interested in finding out if teams in an MMO setting are better able to overcome these problems of virtual teams.

[Mikyo]

8.

The most successfull guilds socialize very much. Those offduty relationships are the glue that hold them together. Oddly, even tho most games provide marvellous communication tools, they do this mostly outside of the game, thru email, instant message, websites, forums and such. Somehow the simple change of setting, from inworld to outside, is a sort of 'icebreaker' that encourages them to relate in a different way.

[Matt Mihaly]

9.

We've worked virtually (up to 16 people now) since I founded Iron Realms in 1996. Biggest challenge is weeding out those who can't manage their own time or are lazy. They're harder to identify when one can't watch how they work.

I'm sure there is lots of fancy groupware we could be using but we find the most effective combination is a mashup of email, wikis, forum software, Skype, and our own virtual worlds (where we have many of our meetings).
--matt

[Prokofy Neva]

10.

>People who work away from other people tend to spend less time filling the day with idle chit chat,

Twitter fixed all that, you can now idly chit-chat with your numerous continuous partial friends, continously, and partially. www.twitter.com

[Rod Montgomery]

11.

When thinking about virtual organizations, to what extent do Peter Drucker's observations about real-world organizations apply?

Paraphrased from _The Effective Executive_:

Effective executives make strength productive. Only strength can produce results: weakness only produces headaches, and the absence of weakness produces nothing.

But noone is strong in all respects. Indeed, individuals who have great strengths also have great weaknesses.

The purpose of *organization* is to make strengths productive, and weaknesses irrelevant, in attaining the objectives of the organization.

[end paraphrase]

So: in virtual organizations, is it easier, or harder, than in real organizations, to identify strengths and weaknesses and to assign work so as to make the strengths productive and the weaknesses irrelevant?

Or is it sometimes easier, sometimes harder? And if so, how do we predict which it is, before choosing between real and virtual for any particular organization?