Description
Apply risk management, ethical decision-making and problem solving management skills to achieve small group goals.
Assignment: Risk Management:
Behaving and enacting ethically motivated decisions in an organization in line with the organization’s stated mission, vision, and values create a more aligned organization. It also creates credibility as the organization members behave as they say they will.
Read the scenario and then use the table provided to assess the risks involved on a scale from 1 to 5 (highest). Then decide how they can use ethical decision-making and the company code of conduct to enact a resolution.
Scenario (fictional):
The company Do Right Customer Service is a third-party call center customer service provider to various corporations in North America (U.S., Canada, Mexico). The company Code of Conduct espouses: “Above all we value integrity in all we say and do; we treat our stakeholders and our communities in which we operate with care for their well-being.”
The company’s current headquarters is in Des Moines, Iowa, and the company has been growing exponentially. Up until now the work teams have been composed of 4–6 employees in small teams. However, they want to reduce overhead costs in the next 9 months, while expanding their services or they will have to start firing 40% of the workforce. They know that at least 70% of the workers (i.e., 100 employees) do not want to move to another location. They have leased land in Monterrey, Mexico that has a building that could accommodate at least 50% of the employees needed for this move.
The town of Monterrey meanwhile has recently had a spate of gang violence that has toppled the existing governorship of the state. In addition, the air quality index indicates that 30% of the days, especially in the months of October through January have air quality indexes indicating risk to the elderly and children in terms of breathing difficulties.
Several supervisors of the call center teams have voiced concern over the location after the company announced their plans. Some of the company employees have been putting negative comments out on social media deriding the company’s plans. The company wants the one new location started because they want control over the call center customer service quality provided. They will also need additional supervisors at the new expanded location and at the same time are also concerned about the company image and morale during this whole process.
The current workforce is fluent in at least two languages and earns better than average wages. The average years of experience of each customer service representative is 5 years.
Checklist:
Using the table in the template provided, fill in the risks.
Consider the essential values statement derived from the company’s Code of Conduct and the company’s plans and goals.
Use what you have learned regarding ethical decision-making and problem-solving to suggest a management solution to the company to expand their customer service teams in an ethical and effective manner.
Explain how your suggested solution will mitigate each of the risks you identified. If there are some risks that your solution will not mitigate, provide an explanation.
Your submission must include a minimum of two references. The first is the course textbook, and the second is an article from the database ABI/INFORM Collection in the PG Library. Any additional articles must also derive from the database ABI/INFORM Collection. Cite using in-text citations where appropriate. Your sources and content should follow the current APA format and citation style (see the Unit 1 reading area for assistance). Visit the Academic Success Center found in the Academic Tools area in your course for further assistance.
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Virtual Leadership: Practical Strategies for Getting the Best Out of Virtual Work and Virtual
Teams
by Penny Pullan
Kogan Page. (c) 2016. Copying Prohibited.
Reprinted for Personal Account, Purdue University Global
[email protected]
Reprinted with permission as a subscription benefit of Skillport,
All rights reserved. Reproduction and/or distribution in whole or in part in electronic,paper or other forms without written permission
is prohibited.
Virtual Leadership: Practical Strategies for Getting the Best Out of Virtual Work and Virtual Teams
Chapter 2: Virtual Leadership, Mindset and Approach
In this chapter I discuss virtual leadership, what it is and how it is critical to successful virtual working. We explore various approaches to leadership
and see how virtual leadership needs a different mindset from traditional leadership. We consider what makes great leaders great and investigate what
skills you need to become an outstanding virtual leader, whatever your role in remote teams. We explore the attitudes, behaviours and aspects of
personality and identity that can make or break a virtual leader. At the end of the chapter, we touch on how you can use your environment to support
your virtual leadership.
By reading this chapter, you will:
understand what virtual leadership is and how it goes beyond more traditional forms of leadership;
appreciate how any member of a virtual team can act as a virtual leader, not just the assigned leader;
gain an insight into the mindset, attitudes and behaviours that you need to be a successful virtual leader;
come up with new ways of using aspects of your personality and identity to support your work as a virtual leader.
Figure 2.1: A mind-map of this chapter
Leadership has changed
Leadership complements management and it is more than just getting things done. It is about sharing and agreeing a compelling view of the future,
connecting with people and engaging them in the work, and together delivering results. There are many different ideas and models of leadership and
probably almost as many books written on the subject! Searches on leadership come up with hundreds of millions of hits. Let’s look back in time to
understand a bit more about where leadership comes from and how it is evolving to cope with our rapidly changing world.
Traditional leadership
Traditional leadership around the world usually focused on particular individuals who led from the front. These were powerful people, usually men, who
commanded and, when they spoke, others had to follow their lead, whatever that meant. An example of this was in the Charge of the Light Brigade in
the Crimean War in 1854. The message ‘Charge!’ came through to the Light Brigade, a group of 600 lightly armoured British troops on horseback.
They didn’t question the order but followed though, leading to very high casualties and many deaths. Alfred, Lord Tennyson captured this well in ‘The
Charge of the Light Brigade’:
Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do and die:
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Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
In the 20th century, command-and-control was the primary way that managers worked, influenced by both the industrial economy of the time and the
military leadership styles used in two world wars and subsequent conflicts. It especially suits areas with lots of repetitive action and unskilled labour,
such as factories and mass-production environments. In this autocratic style of working, managers hold the influence, power and authority, along with
the responsibility to deliver. Managers make the important decisions and relay these to workers to carry them out. While workers are unlikely to be
asked to obey to death, as in the Light Brigade, they still are expected ‘not to reason why’ but to get on with the work instead. Managers supervise the
workers closely and control the work done. Communication is predominantly one way, flowing from the manager to the workers, who expect to be told
what to do. The manager is seen to have the wisdom, knowledge and experience. The workers comply.
The command-and-control style can be efficient, especially in crisis situations where there is not time for discussion and deliberation, and where
problems are known and solutions are clear. The leader needs to deliver the results, using standard methods and experience. It can be useful today in
hierarchical organizations for short projects, which do not require creativity and which generate lots of output by following standard procedures.
Outside of these cases, command and control comes with major issues, the biggest of which is that it does not tap into the creativity and skills of the
individuals doing the work. Henry Ford said, ‘Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?’ This implies that Ford
found each worker’s brain to be a problem, rather than a rich resource to tap into.
Command-and-control leadership works best in situations where the workers are unskilled, the leaders have the knowledge required, and work is
repetitive and routine in nature. In the late 20th century, as repetitive jobs were automated with the use of robots or computers, command-and-control
leadership began to fall out of favour. With more and more workers handling knowledge rather than things, using thinking as a key tool, it no longer
made sense not to harness their minds fully. Command and control tends to reduce workers’ intrinsic motivation to do good work. It can create an ‘us
and them’ culture, dividing managers and workers, as seen when workers take industrial action.
Command-and-control managers are likely to micro-manage the work done by workers, wanting to know precisely what is being done at any time and,
preferably, being able to see the workers’ progress with their own eyes. This is not going to work in a virtual world, is it? While micro-managing their
team might give a manager the feeling of control, it can destroy individuals’ motivation to work. How have you felt when people have micro-managed
you? I suspect you didn’t like it much. I certainly don’t like it at all! In our virtual world, motivation is really important as it helps to keep remote workers
engaged and focused on their virtual work.
So, command and control is not a sensible option for most virtual work. It cuts out the creativity and skills of most of the team, reduces their motivation
to do a good job and creates division. It tries to keep control at the centre, with the manager, who needs to spend a lot of time monitoring what
everyone is doing. Let’s explore what might work better, starting by considering how to increase motivation.
How does motivation work?
With the complex working environment of the 21st century and with large numbers of repetitive jobs now carried out by robot or computer, many
workers are now knowledge workers. They are well educated and have highly developed skills. This is especially true for those virtual workers who
are recruited for the particular knowledge and skills they can bring, regardless of location. So how do we motivate virtual, knowledge workers?
Studies of motivation show that there are three key aspects that motivate workers engaged in non-routine tasks (Pink, 2011). These are:
Purpose: the connection to a cause larger than ourselves that gives meaning to work. It is the yearning to do what we do in the service of
something larger than ourselves and it gives our work meaning.
Autonomy: the desire to direct our own lives.
Mastery: the urge to get better and better at something that matters.
We now know that these three elements are far more powerful motivators for knowledge workers than the rewards and punishments often used, even
today.
Traditional command-and-control leadership does not give workers autonomy, as the boss directs the work, but knowledge workers relish autonomy,
virtual workers especially so. One study showed that virtual managers were very happy to have a remote manager themselves, as they were free to
get on with their jobs rather than being watched all the time (Hall, 2007). (Incidentally, when the same people were asked how their own virtual teams
felt, they were concerned that people reporting to them might feel isolated, forgotten and lonely. This is an interesting mismatch!)
So what sort of leadership styles will tap into these three powerful motivators and provide a good basis for effective virtual work? Let’s look at some
options.
Leadership for today
While command-and-control leadership is still practised in places, especially with routine work, most leaders find that a more inclusive approach works
best. This empowers workers to take their part, not only in carrying out the work but also contributing to decision making. The wisdom, skill and
experience of each individual team member are essential to the success of the team overall. Leaders value the input and contribution of each person.
Leaders agree clear, measurable goals and timescales with their workers, instead of sending them orders and monitoring their output constantly. How
precisely workers do their work is up to each individual. The leaders essentially get out of their workers’ way, giving them the autonomy to achieve the
work in the way of their choice. This helps to motivate workers and it works well virtually.
Some organizations take this even further and operate self-directed teams. These are empowered teams where managers support the team members
rather than supervising the work. Each person shares responsibility for managing and doing the work and the team are jointly responsible for the
quality of the output. Team members in a self-directed team tend to show high levels of commitment and motivation as the leadership is distributed
across the team. Here, the leader becomes more of a facilitator and a coach, making it easy for the people in their team to achieve goals and to
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develop both individually and as a group. In a way, this turns the whole idea of leader from someone whose primary goal is to be the boss to someone
whose primary goal is to serve others. Many writers have explored what this means for leaders, talking about servant leadership, authentic leadership,
facilitative leadership and many other terms.
As a coach and facilitator, the leader asks questions to help people work out the solution for themselves, rather than telling them what to do. This
works best with people who already have some knowledge and skills. Coaching moves them towards being more self-reliant in the future. Any
solutions they come up with are their own solutions and so they are likely to be committed to making them happen. Their own solutions are more likely
to work with their local context than something imposed from far away. This sort of coaching can be done just as easily over telephone calls as face to
face.
This move away from traditional leadership helps to solve another problem. All the attributes required of a leader in our fast-changing world are highly
unlikely to be found in just one person. It is far easier to cover these attributes with several people acting together, and a more distributed leadership
achieves this. ‘Intellectually, it is evident that the heroic leader cannot continue to exist in today’s complex, dynamic organizations, no matter how
talented and gifted… Leadership is a distributed phenomenon, not just emanating from the top’ (Avery, 2004).
Keeping control without command and control
‘But how do I keep control?’ is a typical question for a manager who is used to command and control and is challenged to change their style. It is
important to agree what the virtual team is trying to achieve, and the level of risk involved. The next step is to work out the level of reporting and the
key measures that will help flag to the manager and the team as a whole when they need to get involved to support a colleague to deliver. Don’t try to
include a large number of controls – this would be counterproductive! One or two key controls or measures should be enough: the most important ones
only. In addition, there might be regulatory or legislative controls imposed on the team, which you need to track. This move does not mean doing away
with control altogether. It means letting each team member control the work that they are responsible for. Minimizing the manager’s leader’s controls
like this needs a good level of trust between him/her and the team, which we will explore further in Chapter 3.
Many organizations try to control what happens by imposing rules on their staff. In a fast-changing world, fixed rules give people very little flexibility to
adjust to changing circumstances and complex situations. Instead of a fixed rule, use principles to help everyone to do the right thing. When I worked at
Mars Inc, there were five principles to follow. As long as we abided by these, we had great flexibility to do whatever we felt was right in any situation.
Another example is Alphabet, the holding company of Google, which has the principle ‘do the right thing – follow the law, act honourably, and treat each
other with respect’ (Alphabet, 2015). The use of principles over rules works just as well remotely as it does when everyone is in the same location.
Great leaders
What does great leadership look like? When researchers ask people about their leadership preferences and when election results come in, the results
often come back showing that many people think of leaders as attractive, charismatic, white, older men, able to take risks and likely to be self-centred
and somewhat confrontational.
In terms of effective leadership, none of these matter and some of these are the opposite of what is really needed (Chamorro-Premuzic, 2015). What
does matter in leaders is that they are or have:
competence;
good judgement;
integrity;
vision;
self-awareness;
prudence;
conscientiousness;
intelligence;
self-control;
empathy;
altruism;
sociability.
A study in the UK explored the difference between outstanding leaders and good leaders (Tamkin et al, 2010). Their conclusions were threefold:
Outstanding leaders think and act systemically, considering how different aspects of their organizations interconnect.
Outstanding leaders perceive relationships as the route to performance and give huge amounts of their time and focus to people and the climate
of the organization.
Outstanding leaders are self-confidently humble, as they know that they cannot personally achieve any of the outcomes that they strive for, but
only through their impact and influence on people.
In a study lasting three decades, Kouzes and Posner have asked about the characteristics of admired leaders. The answers have come out
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consistently over time and are: honest, forward-looking, inspiring and competent (Kouzes and Posner, 2011). These are rated far higher than any other
characteristic. Interestingly, the same four come up all over the world, with people from five continents all choosing these as their top four, albeit
sometimes in a different order.
As a virtual leader, consider these lists and think how you can be the best leader you can be. When team members are spread around geographically,
it is especially important to engage people. Your own interpersonal skills will be crucial here to build good relationships with team members and to
boost team morale, even at a distance. Honesty forms the basis for trust and means that your virtual team will accept what you have to say. Being
forward-looking helps you to encourage your team towards a common, future goal together. Inspiration will help people to strive to do their best. Your
competence means that you can do the job and that you will not let others down. Self-awareness of your own skills and abilities is the basis for your
own development.
Kouzes and Posner present a set of practices that they have found when interviewing people about their best experiences of leading others (Kouzes
and Posner, 2012). These are their ‘Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership’, to which I have added a little about how to apply each in a virtual context:
Model the way: how you can set an example to your virtual colleagues, through what you do, what you say and what you write. Most of what they
see will be via technology.
Inspire a shared vision: help people to decide together on a common vision of what should be done, then build clear goals for the future that
everyone has bought into.
Challenge the process: getting to the essence of how things are done and articulating ways to improve. This can start with how you work together
virtually but can go far beyond, to the processes and practices of your organizations.
Enable others to act: build collaboration, even though you are far apart, engaging others and encouraging them to play their part. This means
getting to know them and what makes them tick.
Encourage the heart: recognize other people’s contributions and celebrate successes.
How can you apply these to your own virtual work and your own virtual teams?
If you are wondering how you could possibly ‘encourage the heart’ in your virtual world, this story might give you some ideas:
Carl was invited to a baby shower in Canada. Family and friends of
the mother-to-be were in two physical locations, so they connected by videoconference. The mother-to-be opened her gifts in full view of
both groups, and people on both sites tucked into party food to celebrate the upcoming birth. This inspired Carl to lead a virtual celebration
for his team’s work.
Carl worked with 20 people on six sites across California. After the team successfully passed a major checkpoint for their project with a big
deliverable complete, he hosted a virtual celebration. Booking two conveniently situated videoconference rooms, he encouraged people to
travel to the nearest one to their site. With pizzas and soft drinks, the team celebrated their success together. Carl told me that he printed a
big project timeline, 4 metres long, for each site – it was revealed at the meeting.
The head of the department joined in to say how much he appreciated the team. Carl’s final touch was to recognize individual contributions.
But rather than do this himself, he invited each team member to share what they appreciated about two other team members, one they knew
well and one they didn’t know so well. He had planned an hour for this, but it went down so well that it took two hours, with people chiming in
to acknowledge their colleagues.
If you cannot travel like this, you can still celebrate virtually. I used to send coloured sweets to each site on a large project and we enjoyed
eating them and comparing which colours we preferred. We could have eaten pizza together, but with wide time zones, it would have been
breakfast time for one person, who preferred porridge to pizza! Small chocolates seemed to work just fine.
Leading in a rapidly changing world of work
In the 21st century, we live in a rapidly changing world. Technology is transforming how we do business and allowing new ways of working. We have
vast amounts of information available to us, which we can harness as never before. Cross-functional projects cut across hierarchies. New companies,
with flatter structures than their traditional counterparts, are growing rapidly. Society is changing with a new generation joining the workforce who have
grown up with the internet and cannot imagine a world without smartphones and mobile data. The context for leadership is more complicated than ever
in our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. Change is ever present and experience of the past does not always help.
There are two fundamental areas that any effective leader needs to explore, examine and understand in this rapidly changing world: themselves and
their context. In the rest of this chapter, we consider the first, and the rest of the book considers the context of our work.
Virtual leadership
What leadership style suits virtual working? When team members are physically remote from one another, it is not possible for the leader to see what
each person is doing. Another challenge is that people are very easily distracted away from virtual work to other projects, other work or even social
media. So an autocratic and command-and-control leadership style will not work in this setting – with a few exceptions, even though some leaders are
still trying their hardest to force-fit it.
When team members are remote, they need to be self-motivated to keep working. No one can glance over to see what they are doing and so it makes
sense to give them autonomy on how they carry out their tasks. Engaging people’s hearts and minds is key to keeping people feeling part of the team.
A style that shares the wider purpose of the work and allows the people to do their best, and develop mastery, will motivate people further.
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From my experience, the best leadership style for most virtual work is one where the leader servers the other people in the team, making it as easy as
possible for each person to achieve their best for the team. The leader acts as a facilitator, literally ‘making it easy’. They facilitate engagement of
individuals in the team and the tasks, as much as doing the work. They create an environment where the team and the individuals can thrive and
develop.
How would this facilitative leadership play out in reality in a virtual team? Of course, it would vary from person to person! Here are some of the things
you might notice:
A new team member joins the team. The leader asks in their one-to-one video call what the new member would like to get out of their time in the
team. What skills would they like to develop and what experience would be useful to them as they progress? What help would they need to
participate fully in the virtual team? What technology support would they need to get going? This discussion leads to a shared set of goals for the
individual that support the overall goals of a team.
When the leader calls a team member, they ask questions such as: ‘How are things going?’ ‘How do you plan to get this done?’ ‘How can I help
you to achieve your goals?’ ‘What can each of us do on our own sites that would be helpful for you?’
If something goes wrong, instead of blame, the leader and the team will explore what is needed to put things right. If processes need changing,
they will work together to come up with a better way to do things in the future.
When things go well, the leader will give praise where it is due. Some might send handwritten thank-you cards to their team members, individually
encouraging them by praising them for their hard work, highlighting the difference each has made. Perhaps the leader might arrange a virtual
party, arranging for a small pack of celebratory food and drink to be delivered to each team member, to share together over videoconference. Of
course they would need to take into account any dietary and cultural requirements!
Did you notice how the facilitative virtual leader used open questions, as the leader is exploring rather than telling people what to do?
This type of virtual leadership does not need to sit with any one person. It can be shared amongst team members, who can facilitate and coach each
other. As a member of a virtual team it is possible to lead from any chair by contributing questions and making helpful suggestions.
Starting with self: your values and your motivations
To be the best virtual leader you can be, start working on yourself. Understand yourself. Reflect on what you do. Work to improve and learn.
What motivates you? What is important to you? What would you stand your ground for at work? These are intensely personal questions, which help
you to understand your purpose. Once you know what makes you tick, you can align what you do with your values – you will find that it is much easier
to make the right decisions as a leader, and in life. You will be more motivated as you are fulfilling your purpose. You will also be more aware of times
when your values do not align with other people’s values or your organization’s values, giving you helpful insights as you plan what to do next. Leading
with values makes you more authentic as a leader and helps to create a consistent climate for your team. Unfortunately, understanding your own
values is not simple and can take a lifetime of thought and testing.
Values are what are important to each individual and are unique to that individual. One of my values is integrity, but how I express this value will be
slightly different from someone else using the same word. In my virtual teams, integrity means that I need to be transparent with each team member
and not adapt information so that different people hear different messages from me. Of course, this is more of a challenge virtually where people
cannot observe my everyday behaviours, but they can see me on video at team meetings, listen to me speaking on conference calls and read what I
have written on team collaboration tools, in e-mails and in instant messages. These need to be consistent to show integrity. It’s harder than face-toface, isn’t it?
At the same time, my value of empathy for each person will also come into play, meaning that, where some people might find information hard to hear
or to understand, I would make sure that I knew their situation, communicating the same message but in a way that lands well, leaving them clear on
what to do next and aware that I understand their perspective. Once again, this is more of a challenge virtually, where I cannot see as clearly how a
team member is doing. In a co-located office, I would know if anyone was struggling, just by changes in their behaviour, appearance or patterns of
working. I don’t have that luxury virtually, so I need to focus more on listening carefully for changes, noticing what is happening with people and asking
them how they are.
All this listening, noticing and focus on team members presents a dilemma for me. I could ask to connect to them on social media outside of work,
which would give me a wider perspective on their lives, but perhaps that might be going too far? I don’t want to appear to stalk team members. I don’t
want them to feel pressurized to comply with a request from me to see their personal information, photos and friends. It seems that the limits between
caring, empathy and stalking are becoming blurrier online and much more open to perception and interpretation! It’s not easy, is it?
How does virtual working affect your values? For me, it allows me to keep in touch with a large network of people all over the world. Collaboration is an
important value for me – working with others to produce outputs of value. Some of my collaborators have never met me face to face, even my first
virtual working mentor, Nancy Settle-Murphy, despite being friends for over 15 years!
Virtual working helps me to do much of my work without needing to leave home. As I have teenage children now, it is helpful to them for me to be
available when they need me and this fits with my values: my family is important. Sometimes values clash, though. I wrote this paragraph on a flight
from Birmingham to Munich, on my way to work in Basle, Switzerland, for a client. While l enjoy the rich interaction over three days, it comes at a price.
My value of making a difference to my clients clashes with my value of family and these two need to be kept in balance or I feel uncomfortable and my
work suffers.
Finding your values
How can you find out what your values are? Let’s begin to explore the answers now. Grab a pen and paper and go through these questions step by
step:
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1. Think back to peak experiences in your life, taking into account your home life as well as work. These are times when life couldn’t get any better
and you felt that what you were doing was just right. You felt happy, satisfied and maybe even proud too. Perhaps these were times when you
were really effective and efficient? Bring each experience back to life by exploring what you could see at that precise moment, what you could
hear around you and what people were saying, what you could feel on your skin and inside your body at that particular time. What was happening
and why? What do you notice looking back over time? What values were in play? Write them down in a way that suits you: in a list or a mind-map.
If you need inspiration, you might find that a list of values is helpful to trigger your own thoughts. You can find hundreds of values listed online
(Pavlina, 2004).
2. An alternative way to approach this, is to think about times in your life when you felt that something was really wrong. You felt uncomfortable with
what was happening, even if you didn’t know exactly why. You probably had a gut reaction as well as thinking that there was something wrong.
Looking back, which values were being compromised? Write these down too.
3. You might find it helpful to talk this through with others, as they are likely to notice values that you would miss, especially ones that you think of as
normal. Ask them what they consider to be particularly important to you.
4. Once you have a full set of values, the next step is to sort them. Which ones are most important? Which ones would you want to prioritize? The
best way to do this is to focus on a couple of values at any one time. Which one is more important? A useful question here is, ‘If I could only
satisfy one of these, which one would I choose?’ If the more important one is not at the top, then swap them over. Then move on to the next pair
down the list. Repeat this from the top of the list, until you have your values in order of priority from the most important at the top to the least
important at the bottom.
5. Once you have your values listed and prioritized, test them. Are they right? Would you be happy to share the top three with your boss, your
partner (if you have one) and other family members? Do they make you feel proud and inspire you? If you find that one of your possible values
could hurt you, or if your values contradict each other, then there is more work to be done!
6. What do your values mean for your virtual work? What will you keep doing that works well and fits your values? What things will you stop doing
that conflict with your values? What do your values suggest that you could do differently as a virtual leader?
Once you have identified your values, review them regularly to remind yourself about what is most important to you. You might like to put them on
a screensaver or a Post-it note that you will see every day as a natural reminder.
Your mindset and attitudes
What sort of leader are you? What behaviours do you use? How could you change to become a better leader?
Let’s consider a range of attitudes and behaviours that are helpful to the virtual leader in turn, drawing from Brake (2008), Coats and Coddrington
(2015), Settle-Murphy (2013) and others.
Respect
As a virtual leader, treat others with consideration. This means understanding their local context, their perspectives, their culture, their generation, their
nationality and language and other aspects of their identity, and then choosing to act appropriately. An example of lack of respect came from Bob,
completely unintentionally. He manages a global virtual team from Texas, United States. He once asked everyone to attend a conference call on Friday
morning, his time. While the time fell at an appropriate time of day for each member of his global team, Bob had forgotten that Mariam, from Doha,
Qatar, would not be at work. Friday is a holy day across most of the Middle East and the weekend runs from Friday to Saturday, rather
