The Impact of Cultural Diversity on Global Virtual Team Collaboration A Social Identity Perspective (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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Virtual teams are usually geographically dispersed and consist of members from different countries and cultures. They influences internal communication processes and can cause personal conflicts, misunderstandings or lack of trust. Intercultural diversity is also significant for goal setting and team effectiveness. The aim of this article is to check if virtual team members appreciate the cultural diversity or rather suffer from lack of team cohesion and mutual understanding. The article presents research conducted among specialists from IT sector who have experience in working in virtual teams. They perceive intercultural collaboration in virtual teams as the opportunity to exploit the potential of specialists from all over the world but they also point to some challenges related to cross-cultural virtual teamwork.
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The advancement of information and communication technology grant access for businesses to reach global workforce. In a condition where companies hire their employee from cross-border market, the exposure of multicultural differences will be more in contact. Some of the problem faced by virtual multicultural team are cultural discrepancy, communication problem, long distance conflict, and lack of synergy. The objective of this study is to explore the multicultural characteristics emerged from virtual team activity to minimize the problem. This research adopts a case study to examine the comprehensive understanding of virtual multicultural team activity and get new insight from dwelling activity into the context directly. This study has two results: a virtual team and multicultural team characteristics in digital company and Hybrid company. This study can help practitioners identify what multicultural level of focus is well-suited to their current business model and give researcher an overview of future research on the alternatives in managing virtual multicultural team by building virtual multicultural team framework.
Examining ICT-Mediated Cultural Factors for Subgroup Impact on Virtual Team Dynamics
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As virtual teams are inherently heterogeneous and distributed in nature they have a greater tendency to fracture into subgroups. Proper management of these subgroups is critical as they are often more detrimental than beneficial. Research that systematically examines subgroup formation is limited in identifying factors that influence the negative or positive impact of subgroups. To address this gap, we propose a new model based on Social Categorization Theory, Faultline Theory and the diversity literature. Our model takes into account the temporal impact of different cultural factors, namely surface and deep level culture diversity, with the alignment of other attributes on subgroup saliency. It also captures the interaction of varying levels of culture (national, organizational, functional) and their impact on subgroup dynamics. Additionally, the model represents the norms of technology use as a mediator for the impact of subgroup saliency on team performance.
Diversity becomes apparent in interaction and the way researchers could investigate the role of team diversity for contemporary organizations is by focusing on how people form subgroups and their impact on global virtual teams (GVTs). Virtual teams are essential work forms in contemporary organizations. This project investigates how objective team faultlines and subjective awareness of team subgroups as well as geographic distribution in globally distributed teams impact subgroup formation, team processes and outcomes. Utilizing faultline theory (Lau & Murnighan, 1998) and communicatively constructed identification theory (Scott, Corman & Cheney, 1998) and using a multi-method approach, the findings are based on a field study conducted on site of a global software organization drawing on both an international survey of global team members and observation and in-depth interviews with global team members. The survey results identify factors that moderate the relationship between team ...
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In the process of internationalization, multicultural management deal with the cultural differences issues, i.e. diversity related to language, values, customs and behavior in the workplace. Due to the internationalization of companies and work teams, new organizational structures have emerged, such as virtual teams. The purpose of this paper is to understand the influence of cultural differences and multiculturalism in virtual teams as well as to identify potential cultural impacts in their work development and performance. For this, it was conducted a single case study in depth in a US multinational IT company. After completed the content analysis, we identified issues related to the differences between the global organizational culture and the national culture of the team members, communication barriers, differences in leadership style and acclimatization to the virtuality. They led to the conclusion that virtual teams, although they are essential to the growth and evolution of t...
MAJOR CHALLENGES IN MULTICULTURAL VIRTUAL TEAMS
Some of the problems that multi-cultural virtual teams experience include: time delays in replies, lack of synergy among cross-cultural team members, communications breakdowns, unresolved conflicts among members, limited hours allowed to be worked and different holidays. This paper reviews major challenges faced by multi-cultural virtual teams and describes some managerial implications. Although many previous studies have focused in various factors such as telecommuting issues, there are few studies that investigate the issues in multi-cultural virtual teams. The main objective of this research-in-progress paper is to empirically investigate multi-cultural challenges in virtual teams and outline the proposed research.