Web 2.0 City Slickers is the name and fighting Social Loafing is the game. In our Final assault, for BITE 5389: Web 2.0 & Virtual Teams, we were given the task of working as a Virtual team on Multicultural Virtual Teams. We were to collectively construct a report amongst ourselves on best practices for managing multicultural teams and ways to prevent social loafing. The paper had to read as if one individual wrote it, but contained the work of 3-4 team members who use Web 2.0 tools to collaborate.
To begin our conquest, we as a team, had to develop a Team Work Plan that would operate as our guidelines for conducting team work. The team work plan included everything from our contact information, team beliefs, values, methods for diffusing disagreements, our strengths, weakness, and a timeline for getting information in.
Secondly, we each went out into the educational world to find previous studies on managing Multicultural Virtual Teams and Social Loafing. We used information gathered from the studies we found as the foundation for creating our paper. Google Docs became our block of Legos. We had all the necessary pieces; we just needed to build them up together. At the same time, we had applied the very principles of managing virtual teams for our team to operate.
After the final report was complete, we were given a team assessment to identify who social loafed, while the other members fought the hard battle. Web 2.0 City Slickers did not have this problem. Everyone pulled their own weight and some even worked extra hard. There was no social loafing there. Our team accomplished what we set out to do, create a paper that was substantial in information in regards to managing virtual teams. And we accomplish it virtually.
