Dialectics in a global software team: Negotiating tensions across time, space, and culture

Abstract

This study examines dialectical tensions in global virtual teams, and the ways in which tensions are negotiated through communicative practices of team members. Drawing on ethnographic data from a global software team, the analysis revealed three main tensions in global team interaction: autonomy—connectedness, inclusion— exclusion, and empowerment—disempowerment. These tensions were composed of layers of subdialectics, which were either productive or detrimental depending on how they were managed. Team members engaged in selection, transcendence, and withdrawal strategies to negotiate these dialectics. Managers were more likely to treat tensions productively as complementary dialectics which enabled them to transcend oppositions, whereas lower-level foreign assignees were less able to cope with tensions, experiencing them as simple contradictions or paradoxes which constrained and disempowered them. This research contributes a tension-centered model of global team interaction that challenges dominant assumptions of clarity and consensus characterizing the virtual teams literature and has implications for global organizing more broadly.