The Perception of Virtual, Inter-Team Collaboration Within a Large, Multi-Team Project

Master's Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1,3, Lund University, language: English, abstract: Our research purpose is twofold and comprises theoretical and empirical purposes. The purpose of our research results in the following research question: How do employees experience virtual inter-team collaboration within a large, multi-team project?

Many scholars have investigated team collaboration, either without specifically differentiating intra- and inter-team collaboration or focusing only on intra-team collaboration. Intra-team collaboration means collaboration taking place within the context of one team, whereas inter-team collaboration describes the interaction process between several teams. Thus, in the field of organizational research, we need to advance our knowledge on inter-team collaboration, as it is a way of working that becomes more and more popular and widespread. Our practical aim is to understand collaboration in such emerging business contexts. With more resources available, including technological tools, for individual actors and teams, new ways of collaboration become apparent. We want to contribute to a better understanding of collaboration in the modern sense by investigating how inter-team collaboration is experienced by employees working in the same organization. We especially want to highlight that although the individuals under study are separated into different teams, they still belong to the same organization and work towards a common goal. We believe that being assigned to different teams while still being part of the same organization is especially interesting to investigate.

We do this by studying the collaboration between different teams in a large, financial services company called Beneal Bank (the company name has been changed). The studied organization resembles one of the previously illustrated new organizational designs. More than 80 interdependent teams, including geographically dispersed team members, work on an intra-organizational project to develop a new core-banking system. Thus, our study site has certain characteristics that justify it as a site in which new organizational designs are applied and in which new ways of collaboration are required. Firstly, the organization employs an Agile Methodology, implying that close and continuous collaboration is needed between different, interdependent teams.