Guest editors’ introduction to the focused issue: A new direction for global teams research

Abstract

We recently asked international managers whether they do a significant proportion of their work in global teams, defined as a group of people with a common purpose, working on interdependent tasks, that functions across boundaries of space, time, and organization. Fully eighty-five per cent said they conduct more than half of their work in this setting, and two-thirds reported that they work on two or more such teams. (1) The majority also reported that global teams were relatively new in their organizations, that ten years ago such teams did not generally exist but now, with global business divisions, supply chains, and product development, global teams are the norm rather than the exception (see also Kanawattanachai/Yoo 2002). These managers felt overwhelmed by the situation. What they had learned about teams from training, business schools, and articles helped them somewhat, but fell far short of providing guidance on how to manage these complex situations. While academic research on teams has begun to explore some of these complexities, we believe a real shift in direction on team research is overdue. Research on teams has traditionally been relatively simplistic and linear, looking at observable demographics, generic processes within teams, and outcomes of those processes. Most research on global teams has extended this view to look at the same dynamics in teams in a multinational context. However, the environment that global teams operate in and the configuration of dynamics they experience require that we understand much more complex influences on these teams and their relationship to organizational effectiveness. We believe the concept of "team" as traditionally defined is outdated, especially for today's global teams. When researchers think of a "team", they tend to assume something relatively stable and contiguous with a specific purpose that requires interdependence. But when today's managers in multinational organizations think of their teams, they see shifting membership and boundaries, embedded in multiple organizational and environmental contexts, with dynamic tasks. Moreover, each team member is simultaneously part of several different teams with different if not conflicting purposes. Managing these complex entities is not simply a matter of making a linear extension from managing a traditional team. The step change in complexity requires rethinking how the teams are managed and their roles within organizations (Lane et al. 2004). And this is coming from a difficult starting point where only 14% of companies rated their traditional teaming efforts as 'highly effective' (IW/MPI Census 2004). In this focused issue on global teams, we take a look at the global team from different perspectives, building a more comprehensive picture of today's teams in multinational organizations. To introduce the issue we first set the scene for global team research by identifying the components of such teams' complexity, suggest some new ways to think of global teams as networks of social capital, then summarize the place in the domain of each of the articles in this publication. The Complexity of Global Teams A global team is an internationally distributed group of people, identified by its members and the organization as a team unit, with a specific mandate to make or implement decisions that are international in scope (Canney Davison/Ward 1999, Maznevski/Chudoba 2000). Global teams are designed to reconcile the increasing corporate demands for renewal and adaptability with the need for heightened levels of learning based on inter-unit mutual trust, commitment and co-ordination (Ghoshal/ Bartlett 1995). To researchers, the most noticeable difference between global teams and "normal" teams is the distribution of members; hence, much research on global teams has fallen under the rubric of "virtual teams" (see for example Martins et al. 2004). However, there is much more to these teams than their virtuality. …