Literature review
The global developments in social, political, economic and technology sphere crucially affect organizational survival in the society. These new changes demand that organizations’ management must oblige to developing new management techniques so that their organizations can cope up with harder competition and more demanding market conditions. To large extents, organizations need to raise the performance of their employees through the power of communication (Erogluer, 2011). From the beginning, written and spoken language is considered the way to share meanings and messages for human societies. Often, the most common means of communication for most organizations is face-to-face communication. Communication is the business heart and is important in creating relationships, and the overall success of the business depends on it. Basic functions such as planning, staffing, directing, organizing and controlling cannot be successfully performed without effective communication. In fact, basic units in varied organizations co-exist and operate through communication so that they interact to attain organizational goals. Due to globalization and technological advancements, virtual teams are becoming ever-common in the 21st-century organization. This has changed the communication landscape especially given that these team members lack direct physical contact with each other. This research will aim at examining the relationship between employee performance and organizational communication for virtual teams.
According to research findings, organizational communication is a significant factor that determines the effectiveness of organizations and in improving the job satisfaction of employees and thus productivity (Asamu, 2014). Effective communication in organizations is meant to put across a clear, accurate, and concise message to the organizational workers. Workers’ performance is normally considered as the level of effectiveness of the employees of the organization at dispatching their specified duties. To manage the performance of organizations, the management must set performance expectations and standards, observe, provide feedback and conduct appraisals that enable them to achieve results all of which are done through communication. According to Asamu (2014), employees perform certain tasks if they can identify with their managers or with explicitly named organizational objectives and roles. The relationships between the managers and their employees form the basic agreement of employees to organizational norms so that they can perform. Communication flow creates identification so that workers can internalize desirable values that regard organizational goals and objectives. Better workers’ performance can be achieved where there are reasonable expectation-fit levels and when the social exchange between employees and managers are fair and equal.
However, communication barriers can occur at any stage of communication process which consists of receivers, context, channels, sender, message, and feedback and has the potential of confusion and creating misunderstanding (Harp, 2011). Poor communication results in employees having a low commitment to their organization and, therefore, the organization will be incapable of achieving its set goals. Therefore, there is a need for more research to be conducted so at to examine the relationship between workers’ performance and organizational communication.
Traditionally, managers have spent most of their efforts in exploring how to relate effectively with their employees using face-to-face discussions, notice boards, and public lectures and employee handbooks but today, with the advent of information technology, most of these communication methods are no longer effective to keep companies more profitable and responsive to the needs of their clients (Cummings, 2011). Information technology has rapidly changed the context, channel and message content from senders to receivers. While more research and studies have been carried to explain how communication can be used to reinforce company employees’ performance, less has been done on the same among virtual teams.
One of the global trends in corporates is the significant rise of virtual teams as company assets. These are groups of employees that have the flexibility in work environment often working in geographically dispersed areas towards the achievement of organizational goals. The flexibility to work in other environments was particularly brought by the need to significantly reduce staff turnover as well as increasing employee satisfaction. Global companies like General Electric began to explore exporting teams to their foreign affiliates as well as integrating their global HRM practices (Ruggieri, 2009). Furthermore, new forms of virtualization take place when employees work at home when they are still taking care of their sick children or spouses. In essence, virtual employees are classified as employees who work beyond 50% of their time when they are physically away from their workmates and managers. Virtual teams rely on information technology and telecommunications to accomplish organizational tasks.
The challenge with virtual teams is that communication dynamics for such teams shifts from face-to-face communication that essentially alters societal communication as known today with more body indicators such as body language, eye movement and vocal inflection (Harp, 2011). Ideally, this kind of communication limits the influence of productivity as well as the quality of work that is conducted by virtual teams. Company managers must, therefore, change their mode and approach to communication if they are to succeed in a culture where virtual teams have become a norm. In particular, they must consider the cultural communication contexts of their organization to ensure it positively influences employees to be productive.
The main advantages of virtual teams development are to harness strengths of individual employees despite where they live since virtual teams rely on performing jobs with most knowledgeable team members rather than who they are close with. Employees for such a scenario must allocate a substantial amount of time to understand additional coordination that results from working virtually. This will be of help when establishing meaningful relationships in work that will make virtual employees be productive and integrating multiple locations (Cummings, 2011). Among virtual teams, intrinsic benefits make it easier to measure productivity including performance. Performance is easier to document as well as a review for virtual teams as interactions, outcomes and commitments are reported automatically and electronically. Thus, accurate records of work accomplished by virtual teams allow objective means for business managers to review virtual team productivity.
Using technology to keep records of work for virtual teams is more accurate than if business managers were using informal evaluations conducted through time bound and random observations of processes in work of traditional teams (Berry, 2011). Evaluating and measuring the productivity of virtual teams includes evaluations through peers that have the capability of proving personal and no-task oriented feedback which is absent in face-to-face interactions and communication.
Despite the fact that virtual teams are more likely to be productive that traditional teams, work productivity will only be sustained through enhanced coordination as delays in communication particularly may cause reduced performance and hence productivity. This is especially when the virtual teams are working across multiple countries having different time zones. Also, cultural and language differences that may be associated with each virtual team members is likely to cause significant delays as well as communication barriers (Schiller, & Cui, 2010). These factors pose greater risks to organizational performance and should be addressed if present organizations are to remain competitive. Other risk factors to the performance of virtual teams related to communication are closely connected to support and technical tools given to the virtual team. Virtual teams must be provided with tools that they need to be successful like instant messaging, email, conferencing, collaborative tools and cell phones. When they have these resources available, there are more chances of a virtual team being more productive.
In virtual teams, the responsibility of business leaders is to communicate fruitfully with the varied teams so as to guarantee that work is done. Fruitful communication means that the team leader is dedicated to engaging, providing coaching and mentoring opportunities to the virtual teams. This is done by inspiring among the virtual teams a sense of community and aliveness, even without using face-to-face contact. Virtual teams utilize electronic communication channels for communication. With virtual team leaders dealing with different personalities, languages, and cultures that have possibilities of making communication more difficult, virtual team leaders must instill attitudes of trust so that the virtual team members can participate in crucial decision making when in a team environment and cultivating appropriate communication behaviors namely timely responses, openness and in-depth feedback (Pinjani & Palvia, 2013). And just as in traditional teams, the challenges of virtual leaders are to strike a balance between interaction and direct supervision.
The available literature and findings show that effective communication is important in creating mutual understanding between virtual teams and members which leads to building genuine relationships with the parties in the organization. Also from the studies, poor communication has been found to affect the performance of employees and thus organizations must articulate objectives, goals and policies to their employees through a suitable communication method to improve the performance of virtual teams. Organizations will, therefore, be required to eliminate barriers to communication among virtual teams by creating participative, efficient and transparent communication media through telecommunication to improve virtual team performance and commitment (Golden, 2009). Studying the relationship between virtual team performance and organizational communication is important in understanding how virtual teams should be managed since they are different from traditional teams in organizations.
Research design
This research design adopts a descriptive survey method since the study will collect information on the impact of communication on virtual team employees’ performance in organizations. Descriptive surveys deal with systematic events description in a factual and accurate manner (Tuckman & Harper, 2012). The study area will primarily focus on large organizations having virtual teams as part of their organizational employees. The study will use a well-structured questionnaire in determining the relationship between virtual team performance and organizational performance. The questionnaire will have two sections with the first section defining respondents’ demographic characteristics such as marital status, sex, and age while the second part will query the respondent’s perception and interpretation of communication impacts on workers performance. The main research question will be: what is the relationship between virtual team performance and organizational performance? Collected data will be analyzed through statistical techniques such as inferential and descriptive statistics which will be used to measure reliability and confirm the hypothesis.
The independent variable in this study is the levels of communication, and the dependent variable is the levels of employee performance. This relationship will be depicted as follows; levels of communication will be categorized into high, average and low while dependent variables performance levels will be operationalized as Very High, High, Average, and Low.
Hypothesis: From the studies, poor communication has been found to affect the performance of employees and thus organizations must articulate objectives, goals and policies to their employees through a suitable communication method to improve the performance of virtual teams (Asamu, 2014). Organizations will, therefore, be required to eliminate barriers to communication among virtual teams by creating participative, efficient and transparent communication media through telecommunication to improve virtual team performance and commitment. The Hypothesis in this study is that organizational communication affects virtual team performance.
Implications: When the hypothesis is confirmed, it will reinforce the existing research findings that Organizational communication affects virtual team performance just as it does for traditional employees.
Scenario for rejecting the hypothesis: When no correlation between organizational communication and virtual team performance is discovered in the data.
References
Asamu, F. F. (2014). The impact of communication on workers performance in selected organizations in Lagos State, Nigeria. IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 19(8), 75-82.
Berry, G. R. (2011). Enhancing effectiveness on virtual teams: Understanding why traditional team skills are insufficient. Journal of Business Communication, 0021943610397270.
Cummings, J. N. (2011). Geography is alive and well in virtual teams. Communications of the ACM, 54(8), 24-26.
Erogluer, K. (2011). Örgütsel Iletisim ile Is Tatmini Unsurlari Arasindaki Iliskiler: Kuramsal Bir Inceleme/The Relationship Between Organizational Communication and the Aspects of Job Satisfaction: A Theoretical Study. Ege Akademik Bakis, 11(1), 1409.
Golden, T. (2009). Applying Technology to Work: toward a Better Understanding of Telework. Organization Management Journal. 6(4), 241-250.
Harp, A. L. (2011). Effective Change Communication in the Workplace.
Pinjani, P., & Palvia, P. (2013). Trust and knowledge sharing in diverse global virtual teams. Information & Management, 50(4), 144-153.
Ruggieri, S. (2009). Leadership in Virtual Teams. Society for Personal Research. 37(8), 1017-1022.
Schiller, S. Z., & Cui, J. (2010). Communication Openness in the Workplace: the Effects of Medium (F2F and IM) and Culture (US and China). Journal of Global Information Technology Management, 13(2), 37-75.
Tuckman, B. W., & Harper, B. E. (2012). Conducting educational research. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
