Global Teams

Abstract

Globalization continues to occupy headlines, and thus the minds of business professionals throughout the world. As a consequence of globalization, organizations have increasingly expanded the markets they serve while simultaneously relying on diverse labor pools to exceed both current and future customer needs. Accordingly, global teams (GTs) have proliferated, relying on the diverse talents within each of these teams to meet organizational goals of reaching overseas markets and to execute and implement complex business strategies. GTs, also called multinational work teams, are defined as a specific type of work team in which members come from two or more national or cultural backgrounds. While the definition we adopt for GTs does not necessarily imply that members are geographically distributed (i.e., working virtually), we do acknowledge that most of today’s GTs do work primarily virtually, and thus our review includes research both on GTs and on global virtual teams (GVTs).