In response to my last post (Clearing the Air About Corporate Blogging), Andrew Meyer of ‘Inquiries Into Alignment‘ commented about the problem of getting contributors. He points out that the number of active bloggers within a firm is typically low. In fact, in one of the research papers that I included in my post, the authors found that in a… Read more →
Blogs have been around more than a decade now, but corporate blogging, or the use of blogs within firms, is still limited. From my teaching of business executives and professionals, I believe that this is probably due to a general lack of understanding of blogs and how they can improve social relationships and task performance. In this post, I focus… Read more →
Surinder and I are currently attending the Mardi Gras conference on virtual worlds in Baton Rouge along with our colleague Rui Huang. We are here to present our paper that I discussed in last week’s post and also to hear the exciting work that others are pursuing in and around virtual worlds. I am amazed by the breadth of interests… Read more →
Effective communication in electronic environments can be vexing to virtual teams. We know intuitively that we need proper communication to achieve high quality and efficient outcomes, but we are not always sure how to best achieve effective communication or even what effective communication is for the task at hand. We have mentioned issues around communication in past posts, such as… Read more →
Recently, warfare expert P. W. Singer appeared on several shows (NPR’s Fresh Air, The Daily Show) to talk about his new book Wired for War. While not necessarily the central focus of the book, one point he made caught my attention for its relation to virtual teams. Singer talked about a drone pilot who engages in war, but from afar… Read more →
During the last few years, I have noticed certain changes or patterns in email communication that can potentially damage virtual work. I am afraid that these patterns may be on their way to becoming a part of email communication culture. Many email users may be falling into these usage patterns without realizing their potentially damaging effects. With the idea of… Read more →
I watched in awe from early this morning as the world got ready for the inauguration of Barack Obama as President. I felt joy and hope as I read my dad’s email this morning saying that he was so excited to see the moment that he had dreamed of, but thought might never come in his country. And I… Read more →
Surinder recently passed an article along to me documenting a case study of an asynchronous online role-play used in a university setting. The article set my thoughts in motion about the Leading Virtually blog and my own thinking regarding training, leadership development, and learning in virtual environments in general. We at Leading Virtually obviously believe that virtual teams can be… Read more →
I recently read an article by Line Dube and Daniel Robey entitled “Surviving the paradoxes of virtual teamwork”. The authors, through their research, determined five paradoxes that are prevalent in the realm of virtual teamwork. They then made some suggestions for dealing with each paradox. In the rest of this post I will: List the authors’ five paradoxes and their… Read more →
It is that time of the year when people begin thinking about their new year’s resolutions. We often resolve to change our habits, thinking that the changes will make us more successful and our success, in turn, will make us happier. During the past decade, new research has emerged on the issue of the relationship between success and happiness…. Read more →