Hybrid Virtual Teams in Shared Services Organizations

Working in virtual teams is quickly becoming the rule rather than the exception. One organizational context, where the number of virtual teams has increased significantly in recent years is the Shared Services Organization. Yet, despite their popularity, such virtual teams are fraught with problems of cooperation, as they are prone to suffer from social dilemma situations due to circumstantial, i.e. contextual, reasons. Moreover, the risk of a cooperation problem is not only particularly high, but also difficult to manage in virtual teams. However, our knowledge on how members of hybrid virtual teams in Shared Services Organizations can overcome the cooperation problem is very limited. Therefore the goal of the study presented in this book is to expand our understanding of how cooperation can be fostered in the challenging context of hybrid virtual teams in Shared Services Organizations. I conducted an in-depth qualitative study and identified thirteen different expressions of contextual challenges categorized in ‘faultlines through distance’, ‘disconnection through communication technology’ and ‘discontinuity through temporality of team composition’, which may lead to cooperation problems of hybrid virtual teams in Shared Services Organizations. In a similar context-sensitive manner, this study allows me to expound twenty-two different practices to foster cooperation in such a challenging team context. These practices can be categorized in ‘strategy of identity constructing’, ‘strategy of trusting’ and ‘strategy of virtual peer monitoring’ and can be used by the individual team members to foster cooperation. Further,  I show how technology can facilitate, but not ensure, the use of these strategies and practices to foster cooperation.

Virtual teams, especially hybrid virtual teams, are very popular within organizations today and are the prevalent setup in Shared Services Organizations. But as the following elaborations will show, a successful cooperation between the members of such teams may likely be at risk. Such cooperation problems usually arise through motivational and/or circumstantial reasons. Yet, as this context may be particularly challenging, in the study presented in this book I focus on the latter one and identify three contextual challenges as sensitizing concepts to better understand the circumstantial reasons for cooperation problems in hybrid virtual teams in Shared Services Organizations. Hence, I will start this chapter with a definition of teams and virtual teams to then conceptualize hybrid virtual teams. Afterwards, I will present the Shared Services Organizations as an example for a particularly challenging context for hybrid virtual teams. Then, I will define the cooperation problem in such teams and introduce the three sensitizing concepts of contextual challenges related to distance, technology and temporality. Thereby, I will outline how each of them may compound the cooperation problem between the members of hybrid virtual teams in Shared Services Organizations.

The cooperative behavior among members of hybrid virtual teams in Shared Services Organizations is at risk due to the contextual challenges related to distance, technology and temporality. As formal control is usually missing in such teams, it becomes a team task to ensure cooperation. Therefore, the solutions to overcome the cooperation problem in such teams need to foster cooperation in a constructive way and they also need to be decentralized or team-based approaches. In respect to that, I identified three solutions for the contextual challenges of hybrid virtual teams in Shared Services Organizations, which I will present in this chapter as sensitizing concepts. Thus, I will (1) outline the selection criteria for the sensitizing concepts of solutions to foster cooperation. Then, I will describe each of the three solutions in more detail, wherefore I will introduce (2) identification, (3) trust and (4) peer monitoring as sensitizing concepts. For each of these three solutions I will depict how and why they foster cooperation in the context of hybrid virtual teams in Shared Services Organizations.

The theory-based sensitizing concepts about the contextual challenges putting the cooperation within hybrid virtual teams in Shared Services Organizations at risk as well as the solutions to foster cooperation provide a broad understanding about the complexity of teamwork within such settings. As such sensitizing concepts should be deployed only with the aim to be bolstered with specific content through empirical research, the qualitative, empirical part of the study presented in this book explores how members of hybrid virtual teams in Shared Services Organizations can overcome the cooperation problem to enable their teamwork to flourish. Thus, in the present chapter 1 (1) introduce the overall design of the empirical research design, thereby outlining how the sensitizing concepts informed the formulation of the research questions, (2) present the qualitative field research inspired by organizational ethnography in detail, thereby outlining which ethnographic elements the present study contains; (3) clarify the data collection through expert interviews and (4) explain the process of transcription and data analysis.

One contribution of the study presented in this book is to provide a detailed, context-sensitive and informant-driven answer to the research question about how members of hybrid virtual teams in Shared Services Organizations experience the contextual challenges of distance, technology and temporality. These three sensitizing concepts of the contextual challenges were insight-leading during the empirical study. Further, the rather broad concepts functioned as an orientation to identify a total of thirteen different expressions of the contextual challenges for members of hybrid virtual teams in Shared Services Organizations. Thus, I will (1) give an overview of the findings related to the challenging context, then (2) I will depict the two contextual challenges and their respective ten expressions of the contextual challenges originating from the hybrid virtual team context and afterwards (3) I will display the contextual challenge and the respective three expressions of the contextual challenge, which originate from the context of the Shared Services Organizations.

The study presented in this book provides empirical insights to the research question about how members of hybrid virtual teams in Shared Services Organizations use identification, trust and peer monitoring to overcome the cooperation problem. Such a cooperation problem likely occurs as a result of the contextual challenges they are experiencing. During the interviews the interviewees described how they use identification, trust and peer monitoring to foster cooperation in such a challenging context. Based upon those descriptions, I identified twenty-two different practices to foster cooperation. Thus, I will (1) give an overview of the findings related to the three strategies, which are linked to the sensitizing concepts of solutions to foster cooperation. Afterwards, I provide more details about the strategy of (2) identity constructing, which comprises four different practices to foster cooperation; (3) trusting, which comprises fourteen different practices and lastly (4) virtual peer monitoring, which comprises four different practices used by members of hybrid virtual teams in Shared Services Organizations to overcome the cooperation problem.

The purpose of the study presented in this book is to provide theoretical and practical insights about the contextual challenges, which members of hybrid virtual teams in Shared Services Organizations experience, how they use strategies and practices of identity constructing, trusting and virtual peer monitoring to overcome the cooperation problem and how technology may support or hamper the team members’ use of those three strategies and the respective practices. In this chapter, I will discuss (1) the sociomaterial impact, which technology may have on the deployment of the strategies and respective practices to foster cooperation by comparing the media capabilities of the available technology at GlobalMobility and GlobalTech. Further, I derive (2) theoretical implications from the findings, (3) practical implications to capture the expressions of the contextual challenges and practices to overcome potential cooperation problems within teams and (4) empirical implications, limitations and directions for future research.

The study presented in this book explores how members of hybrid virtual teams in Shared Services Organizations use practices to overcome the cooperation problem in their teams. I therewith respond to the frequent calls for more context-specific research. Specifically, this study corresponds to three major research targets: (1) identifying the expression of real-life contextual challenges in a challenging team setting such as hybrid virtual teams in Shared Services Organizations, (2) exploring strategies and practices used by hybrid virtual team members to overcome the cooperation problem and (3) analyzing the role of technology for using these strategies and practices in hybrid virtual teams in Shared Service Organizations.