IT Service and Support: What To Do With Geographically Distributed Teams?

Introduction The Bureau of Labor Statistics of the United States Department of Labor recently revised the employment projections for the years 2008 to 2018. "The projections show an aging and more racially and ethnically diverse labor force, and employment growth in service-providing industries. More than half of the new jobs will be in professional and related occupations and service occupations." Among the ten industries with the largest wage and salary employment growth were: i) Management, scientific and technical consulting services, and ii) Computer systems design and related services (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2009). The labor force is predicted to be more diverse with the share of the labor force held by minorities projected to increase significantly. These professional and business services also implied that people would be working in a more geographically distributed and culturally diverse environment. Colleagues no longer have to be working side by side. Some workers may not have met their colleague face-to-face, even though they may have communicated via email, telephone or videoconference. In addition, the colleague may come from a different cultural background. Managing this particular type of organizational structure required a different form of leadership. There had been an increasing amount of research and literature focused on distributed teams and effectiveness of virtual teams (Ahuja & Carley, 1998; Dube & Pare, 2001; Lipnack & Stamps, 1997, 2000; Maznevski & Chudoba, 2000; Montoya-Weiss, Massey, & Song, 2001; Ramesh & Dennis, 2002). Such studies provided insights on team development processes but these studies often use ad-hoc student groups in laboratory settings rather than examining existing teams in organizations (Powell, Piccoli, & Ives, 2004). Utilizing a case study approach, we are exploring the organizational environmental factors that contribute to a successful distributed IT support organization. The IT support organizations in two corporations from different industries were studied over a period of 26 months. In this research, we examined the nature of distributed teams in multi-national corporations (MNCs) and factors that influenced their effectiveness. This study aimed to increase our understanding of current work practices in distributed teams. Managers and human resource professionals as well as team leaders who support the distributed teams can use the results of this investigation to develop implementation strategies and interventions for individuals, teams, and organizations to attract and retain their manpower. Literature Review Teams Research on group and team processes had examined the influence of groups on individuals, individuals on groups (e.g., leadership studies), group conflict, group communications, and so on. The influence of the "embedding context" of groups and group development and evolution over time had received far less attention (Arrow, McGrath, & Berdahl, 2000). However, a theoretical perspective on groups was now emerging in social psychology and management studies which viewed groups as "complex, adaptive, dynamic systems ... embedded in a hierarchy of levels and characterized by multiple, bi-directional, and nonlinear causal relations ... [that] developed as systems over time, and change as a function of changing conditions over time" (Arrow et al., 2000). This approach to understanding teams focused on group processes through which a group adapted and changed as context changed, and on the context in which groups operated. Such considerations were particularly relevant to teams transitioning to or operating in a global context. A complex distributed organizational structure enabled by IT inherently required a correspondingly complex group effort to maintain continual IT services. Team development research had produced a number of models representing organizational, group, and process level dimensions to assess group effectiveness. …