Employees who are forced to work virtually for team projects need to navigate the indirect and direct conflicts that can result in performance losses.With reference to and application ofOB theories and concepts:

Determine what factors will likely lead to helping and prosocial behaviours in teams with either low or high virtuality - and explain how these factors will affect outcomes of these teams.(15 marks)

Topic : Virtual Teams

As Mak and Kozlowski (2019) observed before the pandemic, "Virtual teams ... are growing in number and importance." Rather than assume uniformity in virtual team characteristics, though, it is valuable to recognize that "team virtuality" is a multi-faceted concept and encompasses multiple dimensions including the geographical distribution of team members and the relative amounts of (a)synchronous e-communication (Hoch & Kozlowski, 2014). Indeed, a nuanced conceptualizing of virtuality - as a continuous variable, given that teams are not simply either face-to-face or virtual - has already been developed (Mak & Kozlowski, 2019) and should prove helpful for future researchers who work to classify the myriad forms of virtual teamwork that have been thrust on workers via COVID-19.

Prior research shows that virtual teamwork tends to lack the communication richness available to face-to-face teams (Martins, Gilson, & Maynard, 2004) and that traditional teamwork problems such as conflict and coordination can escalate quickly in virtual teams (Mortensen & Hinds, 2001). Building structural scaffolds to mitigate conflicts, align teams, and ensure safe and thorough information processing are key recommendations for virtual teams. For example, prior work has shown the need - especially in virtual teams - to formalize team processes, clarify team goals, and build-in structural solutions to foster psychologically safe discussions (e.g., Gibson & Gibbs, 2006; Huang et al., 2002).

Increased team virtuality as a result of COVID-19 may also affect helping and prosocial behaviour. While physical distancing among co-workers may reduce helping behaviours in the near term, we know that people should be bolder to request help from others since people do tend to be more willing to help, and give better-quality help, than we usually assume (Flynn & Lake, 2008; Newark, Bohns, & Flynn, 2017), perhaps especially during crises. Normal impediments to requesting help centre on the feeling that it can be uncomfortable, awkward, and embarrassing (e.g., Bohns & Flynn, 2010), but "best practices" in helping can assist help-seekers in overcoming these psychological barriers by maintaining personal privacy (Cleavenger & Munyon, 2017), reducing stigmatization (Ben-Porath, 2002), and instilling hope that things will get better once help is received (McDermott, et al., 2017).

As COVID-19 has accelerated the expansion of virtual teams, it will be valuable for researchers to track and study innovations that may enable such teams to function optimally. For example, the intersection of remote work with a global crisis brings up questions of how emotions, such as anxiety and stress, can best be communicated and regulated in the unique setting of virtually connected work where social and emotional cues are relatively limited (for an overview, see Lindebaum, Geddes, & Jordan, 2018). On the other hand, there are prior studies showing that teams operating online tend to be more effective at brainstorming than face-to-face teams (e.g., DeRosa, Smith, & Hantula, 2007) at the same time that research focusing on individual performance has shown that remotely-interacting teammates appear to miss the creative benefits that can flow from frequent face-to-face interactions (Allen, Golden, & Shockley, 2015). The rapid growth in virtual teams offers an opportunity to examine new questions as well as develop interventions to help improve teamwork in virtual settings; and, in that pursuit, close attention needs to be paid to the multidimensional ways in which virtuality varies among remote teams (Mak & Kozlowski, 2019).