Abstract
This chapter notes the lack of coursework responding to the growing need to educate future employees to work and manage teams in the modern digital workplace as part of learning processes. The chapter introduces a case study on a virtual teamwork class developed for higher education students. The class offers a learning experience that resonates with the modern digital workplace and work in geographically dispersed virtual teams. Theoretical framing and instructional designs discussed in the chapter shed light to strategies how disciplinary knowledge on virtual team research were used to develop both the class content and the learning infrastructure. The chapter depicts several connections between disciplinary frameworks in virtual team research and pedagogical concepts in learning and education literatures. These connections offer ideas for developing teaching and learning in online spaces and suggest implications for developing the curricula to better prepare students for the digital, global workplace.
TopIntroduction
“The new coronavirus economy: A gigantic experiment reshaping how we work and live.” (Washington Post, March 21, 2020)
At the dawn of the internet, management scholars envisioned the future of organizing as “dynamic networks with heavy reliance on self-managed workgroups and a greater willingness to view organizational boundaries and membership as highly flexible” (Miles & Snow, 1986, p. 73). Today, this vision is reality. Virtual work is ubiquitous and practices to organize work around projects performed in teams with fluid memberships are common in almost any organization, especially large global organizations. Collaborative communication technology is there to support this kind of work organization. When the global COVID-19 pandemic disrupted lives around the world and turned millions of homes into digital workplaces, it was collaborative communication technology that made it possible.
The pandemic crisis only reinforces the argument that there is an ever growing need to educate future managers and employees to work and manage teams within digital workspaces. Still, the coursework on virtual teamwork and virtual team management is not as abundant in the higher education curricula as the digitalization of the workplace would let one believe. It is often assumed that the largest generation in workforce presently, Millennials, and the incoming post-Millennials, or generation Z, are all digital natives, colloquially referred to as “diginatives” (Prensky, 2001; see also Clarke & Clarke, 2009; Pinheiro & Simões, 2016; Proserpio & Gioia, 2007; Seemiller & Grace, 2017). However, research suggests that Millennials are equally challenged by work-place communication technologies as older generations and can be hesitant to use enterprise social network (ESN) platforms as Slack, Yammer, and WhatsApp (Leonardi, 2015; Neeley & Leonardi, 2018).
Digitization of communication and online collaboration tools have enabled all kinds of organizations to form knowledge-based teams whose members work from different geographical locations and bring their expertise together when and where they are needed. Not only have digital technologies and digitized data transformed how we work, but the technology development has also encouraged the adoption of new organizing models. The increasing pace of change in the hyper-connected world demands shorter response times, and traditional managerial controls and reporting relationships may not support the level of agility needed in a fast-moving environment. New organizing patterns encourage employees to develop increased independence and self-management within their teams (Lee & Edmondson, 2017). The concept of the increasingly digitized workplace has been a rapidly approaching reality, and yet students in higher education are not being well-prepared to thrive within these modern workplaces. Being successful within globalized businesses and in their trans-cultural professional acquaintances in virtual workspaces relies on specific skillsets that need to be develop already during studying years in universities (see e.g., Pinheiro & Simões, 2020).
This book chapter takes upon the mission to address this lack of coursework in higher education and discusses the theoretical framing and instructional design for a class in virtual teamwork. The case class presented in this chapter draws on disciplinary knowledge and research on virtual teams. The chapter discusses the class considering the readings, class materials, student assignments and team deliverables which portray the theoretical and methodological foundations of the coursework. This discussion sheds light to strategies how disciplinary knowledge and frameworks were used to develop the class content as well as the learning infrastructure (Arbaugh et al., 2009; Arbaugh et al., 2013; Tann & Scott, 2021). Perhaps surprisingly, this case study finds several connections between disciplinary frameworks in virtual team research and pedagogical considerations and concepts in learning and education literatures, and thus will end up encouraging educators to explore virtual team research for pedagogical design ideas for the digital learning environments.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Enterprise Social Media (ESM): ESM contains enterprise-wide social network sites (ESNS), such as Yammer, and include features of public social media but are limited to communication among specified members who mutually agree to become communication partners, as individuals or members of a group or both.
Disciplinary Knowledge: Scholarly, research-based knowledge of the subject matter; in this article disciplinary knowledge refers specifically to virtual team research.
Team Communication Platforms (TCP): In the context of teamwork, collaboration platforms and social sites are also called team communication platforms (TCP). They support situated knowledge sharing and collaborative practices for a selected group of participants such as virtual teams.
Teaming: Teaming is a process when a group, such as virtual team, representing diverse expertise work together to achieve mutually defined goals. In this book chapter, teaming is viewed as a communicative process, and in virtual teams, specifically, this teaming takes place in computer-mediated-communication.
Collaborative Online International Learning Experience (COIL): COIL is an umbrella name for instructional team projects where students are brought to work together from scattered locations using technology for connecting and collaborating. A COIL project can be embedded as part of classwork, or it can be an independent project.
Remote Work: Common name for work that is done from dispersed locations, often from home, via computer-mediated-communication (CMC); in modern, contemporary organizations, specifically, using enterprise social media (ESM) and team collaboration platforms such Microsoft Teams, or Slack.
Learning Infrastructure: As used in this chapter, the learning infrastructure embraces the flow of the class, as well as student learning strategies and the communication infrastructure. One could imagine this learning infrastructure as an intangible but essential display for teaching and learning to take place.
Virtual Teams (VTs): Teams with memberships collaborating from many different locations (distributed memberships) by means of technology in place of actual shared offices or conference rooms. Virtual teams have become a common place practice for organizations to leverage the intellectual capital from dispersed locations around the same cause. Today, virtual team members interact with one another across geographic, organizational, and other boundaries, using team collaboration platforms and digital communications. A virtual team whose members are distributed around the world is called Global Virtual Team (GVT) in the disciplinary research.