Global Virtual Teams Research Articles

Shared Leadership Emergence in Global Virtual Teams: Role of Task and Team Design

The ability of a single leader to exert direct influence on globally distributed teams diminishes when members are scattered across boundaries. Sharing leadership responsibility over these boundari...

Building Collaboration in Virtual Teams through Emotional Intelligence: Mediation by SOAR

In today’s global business environment virtual teams have increased rapidly worldwide due to advances in communication technology that facilitate communication and sharing of information among team...

"Isolated Team Members, Perceived Proximity and Global Virtual Team Effectiveness"

This study focuses on the positive consequences of isolation in global virtual teams. Isolation index is the percentage of team members with no other team members at their site (O'Leary, & Cummings...

Achieving reliability in transnational work on complex projects: new directions for research

The delivery of complex engineering projects today often involves globally distributed teams. In these teams, engineers must check for inadvertent errors by following the assumptions, logic and computations of others and define processes to reduce these errors. Engineering firms are thus increasingly using digital technologies to enable teams to do transnational work. While project management research on global virtual teams articulates how team performance relates to composition and characteristics, it has paid less attention to reliability and how this is achieved in such transnational work. This paper considers how constructs related to reliability—trust, culture and communication—become inter-related in work on complex projects. Recent research on work practice, which examines dynamics over time, is brought into dialogue with the literature on global virtual teams, re-conceptualizing trust as enacted in practice; culture as a resource for action and communication as a mediated dialogue. Vignettes from...

Virtual Teams and International Business Teaching and Learning: The Case of the Global Enterprise Experience (GEE)

The increasing importance of global virtual teams in business is reflected in the classroom by the increased adoption of activities that facilitate real-time cross-cultural interaction. This article documents the experience of students from two Colombian universities who participated in a collaborative international project using virtual teams as part of the international business (IB) curriculum. The data reveals that in spite of challenges associated with time zone differences, technology limitations, and trust issues, the vast majority of students perceived that the use of virtual teams as a teaching tool facilitates cultural understanding and IB-relevant learning. The findings of this research suggest that online experiential exercises can be an effective approach in teaching and in the development of virtual collaboration skills.

A Process-Based Explanation of the Psychic Distance Paradox: Evidence from Global Virtual Teams

Previous research has found evidence of a counter-intuitive positive relationship between psychic distance and performance, which has been labeled the “psychic distance paradox”. However, there is a dearth of literature explaining the causal mechanisms that elucidates such a positive relationship. Studying the effect of team-level psychic distance on the performance of global virtual teams, we build on the input-process-outcome framework of team research, which allows the integration of process variables to provide new insights into the underlying coherences of the psychic distance paradox. These variables include the team members’ expectation of challenges as well as the level of team effort toward the task. The team members’ motivational cultural intelligence is introduced to the model as a moderating factor. The data support the hypothesized causal path. The findings start unveiling the psychic distance paradox through the integration of the literatures on psychic distance and global virtual teams.

Intercultural Communication and Management Factors and Their Impact to the Process of Global Software Development for Virtual and Non-Virtual Teams

Abstract This position paper presents the factors involved in the successful software development and what is the impact of some methodologies like Agile in this process. Global software development projects may be a total success or an anticipated disaster for simple reasons that usually have nothing to do with the technology involved, with the time differences, or the product being built, but because of subtle intercultural factors. How do the language, the race, the gender, the religion, and the location affects the software development process from analysis and design to implementation, testing and maintenance? Do all these factors impact in the same way if we are working with a local team, and offshore development team or even a global virtual team? Is any specific software development methodology better suited for your particular case? How could you decide what’s the better approach? What will be the results and what our goals? The issues at stake are not superficial matters of the ways how people dress, or how clear do they speak in our local language, or what they like to eat, or their small daily behaviors, but are based in the fundamental differences in the systems of values that govern our lives. So institutions, corporations and global companies have to raise the level of awareness of their employees worldwide on the cultural differences, through various programs for intercultural or diversity training. But this poor model of cultural awareness is not enough to overcome some of the obstacles that intercultural differences bring to the table. So this paper will list and describe this important intercultural factors that directly impact in the software development process and how certain software development methodologies could be used in order to have a more systematic look or set of guidelines that would allow the team managers to evaluate and to decide how theuse of each one of these software development methodologies for local teams, non local teams and virtual teams will affect positively or negatively the outcomes of software development practices.

Leading Effective Global Virtual Teams: The Consequences of Methods of Communication

This paper explores the relationship between communication and team effectiveness within the context of global virtual teams, arguing that a range of communication methods may impact upon the team’s effectiveness. To explore this relationship empirically, we present a key informant insights based on the activities deployed by a participant in a global team. The paper reports on the team’s effectiveness, their communication strategies and the team’s psychological traits: trust, shared understanding and co-operation. Findings from the pattern matching analysis indicate that the limited range of communication methods available to a global virtual team was not a major contributing factor to a team’s effectiveness. The paper offers communication/management techniques that could be beneficial to the global virtual team leader in facilitating team effectiveness, highlighting some issues surrounding the level of dispersion within teams that could be further explored in future research.

Understanding Diverse Cultures is Imperative for Building Global Virtual Teams

A global virtual team is a sophisticated system of people who routinely confront cultural differences in a digital environment that is constantly changing. This study argues that understanding cultural differences is imperative for the success of a group of individuals within a team communicating virtually from different locations throughout the world. It is vital that cultural differences are clearly comprehended as they pertain to defining and understanding the role of management, the use of communication technology, expectations about profit and performance goals, the concept of time when planning and scheduling, the assessment of risk, and the definition of reward. This paper defines these critical dimensions for cultural diversity and their impact on the relationships between global virtual team members. The basis for the arguments are dependent upon existing scholarly literature solidified by practical examples of real world individuals experienced within the multi-cultural global business environments.

Selecting Communication Media in Multilingual Virtual Teams

This study investigates the impact of language barriers on the selection of communication media in the work process of global virtual teams (GVTs). Based on semi-structured interviews with 30 leade...

Leadership and Teamwork in the Global-Virtual Workplace

As organizations endeavor to leverage human capital expertise across locations, global-virtual teams have increased in frequency. After much theoretical development regarding dimensions and typologies of virtual teams, questions remain regarding their process functions in leadership and teamwork. This symposium focuses on essential qualities of global-virtual teams (GVTs) in the workplace: their characteristics and composition, their processes of communication and development of team identity and how shared leadership is established. Shared leadership, recognized as an optimal leadership style for distributed teams, and team identities that enhance or reduce a team’s processes of shared knowledge, communication and inter-team relationships, are examined using lab and field designs. These factors are examined in how they develop, and how they influence intra-team processes that improve GVT effectiveness.

Performance Evaluation for Global Virtual Teams (GVTs): Application of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)

This paper builds all the discussions on an exhaustive literature review through critically investigating differentaspects of managing GVTs concerning imposing control on virtual teams and measuring their performance. Theforegoing features of managing GVTs have been regarded as problematic due to the idiosyncrasies of virtualteam working. Besides, there are disagreementsin the literature regarding the necessity of implementing controland auditing for GVTs’ context. To address the mentioned challenges, the crucial role of control and evaluatingthe performance of GVTs will be established based on the evidences from the litearture. Afterwards, the keyrequirements of performance evaluation for GVTs will be ascertained. Subsequently, the paper will brieflyintroduce Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) as an available method for comparing and evaluating theperformances of GVTs. The study will conclude by presenting guidelines to facilitate harnessing the abilities ofDEA to measure the performance of GVTs and presenting directions for future studies in the area.

“Communicate Through the Roof”: A Case Study Analysis of the Communicative Rules and Resources of an Effective Global Virtual Team

Challenges to effective collaboration are magnified when work teams are composed of geographically distributed members. Team members separated by time, distance, and culture often struggle with issues of trust, conflict, and potentially divisive subgroups. With global virtual teams becoming increasingly common in organizations, it is important to understand how to minimize such interactional difficulties. This study examines rules and resources that members of a corporate global team draw on to structure their interactions. In this case study, team members draw on highly ritualized actions prescribed by their software development process and their enacted values to mitigate their communication challenges.

Leading global virtual teams to success

Leading global virtual teams to success

Using Communication Choices as a Boundary-Management Strategy

This study examines how members of a global virtual team chose communication media while managing multiple boundaries. The study is unique in that it considers the perspectives of U.S. managers who teleworked from domestic workplaces and virtual team members located in offices in India. It describes the complex dynamics of the decision-making processes that team members used in attempting to allocate their individual resources in order to meet the demands of a high-performance organizational culture. The findings suggest that managers chose media that met task requirements and maintained the boundaries between their work and personal lives rather than media that would provide the most satisfactory experience.

Leadership Constraints

This research focused on the question: What leadership constraints contribute to the complexity of the working environment faced by global virtual team leaders and how do those leadership constraints impact the behavior of leaders when they are trying to meet team member expectations? This qualitative study of a high performing team within a multinational corporation (MNC) identified four constraints facing leaders: virtuality, globalization, the domestic workplace, and the matrix organizational structure. These constraints and their interactions contributed to the complexity that leaders faced when attempting to influence followers. While work/life roles have changed dramatically for leaders, team member expectations remain rooted in the past.

Transferring Western Management Knowledge to China: Perceptions of Graduates from an American Executive MBA Program

As is well-known, China’s rapid economic growth over the past decades has been impressive and this growth has driven the demand of qualified managers and professionals by both foreign and Chinese enterprises. This paper examines perceptions of the graduates of an American Executive MBA program, who experienced the transfer of Western management knowledge through team teaching and virtual student teams. The findings show that graduates are generally satisfied with their overall educational experience and its impact on their career in terms of promotions and compensation. Furthermore, the team teaching and global virtual student teams are viewed as valuable experiences.

Trust and knowledge sharing in diverse global virtual teams

Global virtual teams (GVTs) allow organizations to improve productivity, procure global knowledge, and transfer best practice information instantaneously among team members. GVTs rely heavily on IT and have little face-to-face interaction, thereby increasing problems resulting from geographic barriers, time language, and cultural differences, and inter-personal relationships. The purpose of our study was to design a normative framework that would assist organizations in understanding the relationship between diversity, mutual trust, and knowledge sharing among GVTs, with additional focus on understanding the moderating impact of collaborative technology and task characteristics. Empirical data was collected from 58 GVTs and analyzed using a Hierarchical Multiple Regression technique. Results showed that in GVTs, deep level diversity has a more significant relationship with team processes of mutual trust and knowledge sharing than visible functional level diversity. This relationship is moderated by the collaborative capabilities of available technology and levels of interdependence of the task. Furthermore, knowledge sharing and mutual trust mediate the relationship between diversity levels and team effectiveness.

Communication skills to develop trusting relationships on global virtual engineering capstone teams

As universities seek to provide cost-effective, cross-cultural experiences using global virtual (GV) teams, the ‘soft’ communication skills typical of all teams, increases in importance for GV teams. Students need to be taught how to navigate through cultural issues and virtual tool issues to build strong trusting relationships with distant team members. Weekly team meetings provide an excellent opportunity to observe key team interactions that facilitate relationship and trust-building among team members. This study observed the weekly team meetings of engineering students attending two US universities and one Asian university as they collaborated as a single GV capstone GV team. In addition local team members were interviewed individually and collectively throughout the project to determine strategies that facilitated team relations and trust. Findings indicate the importance of student choice of virtual communication tools, the refining of communication practices, and specific actions to build trusting relationships. As student developed these attributes, collaboration and success was experienced on this GV team.

Global virtual engineering teams (GVETs): A fertile ground for research in Australian construction projects context

Implementation of global virtual engineering teams (GVETs) commenced since at least two decades ago, but construction has been behind other industries in terms of harnessing this new paradigm. Nevertheless, GVETs are receiving increasing attention within the construction context due to numerous potential benefits they can bring about for the projects. On the other hand, the research about GVETs in Australia is still in its embryonic stages. Australian scholars noticeably have paid scant attention to GVETs in comparison to their colleagues in other developed countries. This paper assumes the process of implementation of a GVET as an isolated project. The study then highlights the well-known main areas of necessary knowledge for managing a GVET project within the construction context based on a project lifecycle approach. Recognizing the weaknesses of existing literature, the paper sets out an agenda for further research within Australian construction projects.