“How to Lead Virtual Teams” guide offers you an experience of practising sustainable leadership in virtual, multicultural, and multidisciplinary teams.
Today, almost every organization operates in virtual and even more complex environments. The ERASMUS+ project “Sustainable Management: Tools for Tomorrow” (TOO4TO) has addressed this challenge and contributed to the goal of better and more sustainable virtual leadership.
The project consortium of has developed a virtual and interactive Guide, “How to Lead Virtual Teams”. It is an open-access and multimodal guide that summarises and compiles the most recent studies and relevant materials related to team development and sustainable leadership. Throughout this guide we have used the story of a virtual project team to illustrate several important examples of challenges and opportunities that real virtual team leaders and members face in their multicultural and multidisciplinary teamwork passing through 4 stages of Susan Wheelan´s team development model. Some examples of the critical factors for virtual teams:
- Media choice (media synchronicity)
- Psychological safety & trust (swift trust)
- Autonomy paradox
- Self-managing VTs
- Diversity in virtual teams
- Handling conflicts
- Emotional intelligence
- Virtual communication
Also, tips and concrete tools for facilitating and collaborating in virtual teams are offered. In addition, polls and assignments make this guide engaging and enhance your learning.
This guide can be used by various businesses and projects collaborating virtually. Also, educational institutions can integrate this guide into their studies to support students’ collaboration online and strengthen their virtual teamwork skills.
“How to lead virtual teams”-guide and other Intellectual Outputs of the project are open-access and can be reached via the project website: https://too4to.eu/
For more information, please contact: Mervi Varhelahti, Turku University of Applied Sciences (Mervi.varhelahti@turkuamk.fi)
