Posted by Recall that in April 2024 there was a national conference “Sustainable enterprise. Dilemmas of sustainable development”. The proceedings took place in Kazimierz Dolny on the Vistula River. The organizers were the Warsaw School of Economics, and the topics of the conference were part of the current issues of implementing the concept of sustainable development and building a sustainable enterprise.
Among management theoreticians and practitioners, we discussed key management problems, conditions for the creation and development of a sustainable enterprise.
The conference was attended by Olaf Flak, PhD, who gave a presentation entitled “Influence of sustainable team management in virtual teams on teamwork performance. Results of research,” which is also related to an article of the same title to be published in the journal Organization and Management.
What conclusions can be drawn from the study, which Olaf Flak, Ph.D., together with Prof. Barbara Kożusznik, Ph.D., conducted among 60 participants working in 12 teams on a complex organizational problem, participating for 41 days in a long-term non-participant observation?
Before answering this question, it should be stated that the research problem formulated in the study concerned the impact of sustainable management of a virtual team on the performance of such a team. Two research questions were formulated that stemmed from the research problem:
- RQ1: To what extent does the lack of a defined manager of a virtual team affect the emergence of a balanced influence of team members on the course of the team?
- RQ2: To what extent does the balanced influence of virtual team members affect the fulfillment of team performance criteria?
Let’s answer question RQ1 first.
To get the answer, we measured the number of managerial actions taken (counting all 10 measured managerial actions together) by individual members of the virtual team. Then basic statistical measures were calculated to assess the degree of sustainable influence of team members on team performance.
It turned out that the number of managerial actions taken varied among team members. In some teams, one person dominated, for example, in team 1 a member of team 1, and in team 10 a member of team 2. In contrast, management in team 7 was very balanced – team members took a similar number of managerial actions.
The coefficient of variation in % (the higher the value, the greater the variation in influence on workflow) showed how the teams participating in the study differed in terms of the influence of team members on workflow. On the one hand, there were teams with a low balance of team management and thus the dominance of one person. On the other hand, it is possible to identify teams and high balance of team management, and thus similar influence of team members on the course of the team.
Therefore, it can be concluded that the lack of a defined virtual team manager has little effect on the emergence of a balanced influence of team members on the course of team performance.
We will present the answer to RQ2’s question in our next blog post.