What's in the Journals

June 2004 | Economist.com:
"Academy of Management Journal
April 2004 (Volume 47, No. 2)
“The impact of team empowerment on virtual team performance”

Following the Harvard Business Review’s May look at handling virtual teams (“Can absence make a team grow stronger?”), the Academy of Management Journal has a study of what “team empowerment” means for teams, especially those with few face-to-face meetings. First the authors, from four American universities, set out the four dimensions of team empowerment: “potency,” or the shared belief that the team can be effective; “meaningfulness,” in which team members care about their work; “autonomy,” which means team members feel they can make decisions; and “impact,” or the belief that their work will make a difference. After polling more than 300 virtual team members of a web-based travel services firm, the authors concluded that the fewer face-to-face meetings a team had, the more vital it was for the team to feel “empowered.” Empowerment turned out to be a bigger factor in performance than meeting time: highly empowered teams scored equally well in customer-service rankings, regardless of the number of face-to-face meetings they had had."