Determinants of cultural adaptation, communication quality, and trust in virtual teams' performance

Abstract

A virtual team is a network group where team members from different cultures are temporarily gathered together for the period of a mission. The present research proposes a general model of virtual teams to investigate how cultural adaptation, communication quality, and trust affect the performance of virtual teams and their interaction with each other. A qualitative method is applied in the study. Four virtual team members from diverse teams are interviewed in order to explore how virtual teams work and whether propositions are confirmed in practice. The analysis results reveal that cultural adaptation, communication quality, and trust have positive effects on the performance of virtual teams. For virtual teams, research findings imply that team leaders should be aware of cultural differences as well as project issues within teams.