Working with multicultural virtual teams: critical factors for facilitation, satisfaction and success (original) (raw)
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Modern organizations face many significant challenges because of turbulent environments and a competitive global economy. Among these challenges are the use of information and communication technology (ICT), a multicultural workforce, and organizational designs that involve global virtual teams. Ad hoc teams create both opportunities and challenges for organizations and many organizations are trying to understand how the virtual environment affects team effectiveness.
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Managing this new virtual intercultural communication phenomenon is one of the most important challenges facing the company in relation to its use of human resources, since the problems created by the inadequate management of such resources can lead to substantial losses for the companies themselves, and may also lead to a feeling of failure among those professionals who, whilst having a well-demonstrated competence in a monocultural, presential context, may be completely unequipped to work in a virtual, intercultural one. In this new environment it is the responsibility of the Human Resources department to respond to these new needs which are arising within the organisation, through improvements in the selection, training and evaluation processes.
The Impact of Cultural Diversity on Global Virtual Team Collaboration A Social Identity Perspective
Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2008), 2008
Global Virtual Teams (GVTs) -teams with geographically and temporally dispersed members who heavily rely on computer-mediated communications (CMC) -face significant collaboration challenges associated with cultural diversity. From the social identity perspective, we investigated the impact of GVT members' cultural individualism/collectivism (I/C) and language identities on their participation in team collaboration. A field experiment involving 33 GVTs was conducted to test our hypotheses. The results indicated that when a team's identity faultlines are strong, its members' I/C and Language identities have significant impact on their levels and forms of participation; and that communication media have significant interaction effects on these relationships.
A Possible Approach of the Cultural Aspects Diagnosis in Collaborative Virtual Teams
ANNALS OF THE ORADEA UNIVERSITY. Fascicle of Management and Technological Engineering., 2012
This paper aims to analyze Collaborative Virtual Teams by taking into consideration items as national culture members' impact upon the whole team and linguistic characteristics of the members. Starting from the conceptual framework definition (describing the concepts of collaborative virtual teams, multiculturalism, cross-cultural and trans-cultural aspects) and also from the advantages of cross-cultural teams, as it appear in relevant references, the paper will focus then on a possible research approach of characterizing cultural aspects (by considering behavior issues and linguistic characteristics) based on a pilot marketing research based on a questionnaire. The conclusions made underline the idea that the virtual cross-teams success depends on how the cultural diversity is managed.