Virtual Multicultural Teams Research Articles

Towards a comprehensive conceptual framework for multicultural virtual teams: a multilevel perspective exploring the relationship between multiculturalism and performance

PurposePerformance in virtual teams, which faces cultural and demographic differences, is a relevant phenomenon that has been widely investigated in recent decades, but with opportunities in exploring other levels of analysis as individual and project. This current research aims to understand how multicultural virtual teams affect individual, team and project performance.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) and bibliometric analysis to capture 273 papers from the Web of Science (WoS) database using a snowball approach. In a second approach, the authors selected 130 papers to conduct a content analysis.FindingsThe authors presented a longitudinal overview regarding the adoption of virtual teams in project management (PM) literature. A conceptual framework was proposed to explore the relationship between multicultural virtual teams and performance with three levels of analysis: individual, teams and project. The authors contributed with research hypotheses to be explored in future empirical studies not only at the team perspective but also at the project and individual levels. The thematic analysis suggested that the literature focus has shifted from hard to soft aspects faced by virtual teams. Social identity/categorization theory was the most prominent theory in this body, but it is not fully explored in PM literature. Other opportunities of future studies are to understand the impact of cultural diversity, the sense of belongingness, the project life cycle and the development of a knowledge management program.Originality/valueThe authors developed a 3-level conceptual framework for future empirical studies and demonstrated that cultural differences are mainly approached at the national level in the literature, bringing suggestions for future empirical research.

Leadership Job Requirements in Multicultural Virtual Teams

Multicultural virtual teams have become increasingly relevant. Organisations and leaders face different challenges in managing these teams. This review analyses and identifies the challenges in multicultural virtual teams and the job requirements for leaders to face these challenges. It answers the question of which behaviour and skills leaders need to manage multicultural virtual teams successfully. A literature review was conducted in which thirty-five publications and their key findings have been considered, analysed, and systemised to derive a concrete requirement profile for leaders of multicultural virtual teams. The results present the challenges that can occur in multicultural virtual teams and the behaviours leaders can demonstrate when facing these challenges. The challenges arise from multicultural differences as well as from the virtual environment. The most important behaviours to face most of the challenges include raising awareness of language barriers and cultural differences, enquiring about team members' needs and expectations, clarifying expectations about the collaboration, establishing binding norms, ensuring compliance, adapting flexibly to individuals and situations, using ‘rich-media’, and synchronising work schedules. The findings also identify leaders' traits, attitudes and skills to execute the recommended behaviour. Leaders of multicultural virtual teams require sensitivity, flexibility, assertiveness, personal initiative, mastering different leadership styles, negotiation competence, and active listening. The outcome of this paper is a practicable overview of possible challenges and required behaviours as well as traits, attitudes, and skills of leaders when managing multicultural virtual teams. Leaders can benefit from this helpful guide for appropriate behaviour in specific challenges. Recruiters can use the findings as a helpful tool for selecting appropriate leaders for multicultural virtual teams.

Effects of Multicultural Teamwork on Individual Procrastination

Aim/Purpose: The purpose of this study is to discover usage differences in task performance by students of different cultures, by examining procrastination patterns from a national cultural perspective and exploring the effect of multicultural virtual teamwork on students’ individual procrastination. Background: This study aims to examine higher-education entrepreneurial learning in the context of multicultural virtual teamwork, as performed during participation on a Global Entrepreneurship course. Methodology: The methodology consists of quantitative comparative data analytics preceding and subsequent to intercultural team activities. This research is based on analyses of objective data collected by Moodle, the LMS used in the In2It project, in its built-in log system from the Global Entrepreneurship course website, which offers students diverse entities of information and tasks. In the examined course, there were 177 participants, from three different countries: United Kingdom, France and Israel. The students were grouped into 40 multicultural virtual (not face-to-face) teams, each one comprised of participants from at least two countries. The primary methodology of this study is analytics of the extracted data, which was transferred into Excel for cleaning purposes and then to SPSS for analysis. Contribution: This study aims to discover the effects of multicultural teamwork on individual procrastination while comparing the differences between cultures, as there are only a few studies exploring this relation. The uniqueness of this study is using and analyzing actual data of student procrastination from logs, whereas other studies of procrastination in multicultural student teams have measured perceived procrastination, collected using surveys. Findings: The results show statistical differences between countries in procrastination of individual assignments before team working: students from UK were the most procrastinators and Israeli students were the least procrastinators, but almost all students procrastinated. However, the outcome of the teamwork was submitted almost without procrastination. Moreover, procrastination in individual assignments performed after finishing the multicultural teamwork dramatically decreased to 10% of the students’ prior individual procrastination. Recommendations for Practitioners: The results from this study, namely, the decline of the procrastination after the multicultural virtual teamwork, can be used by global firms with employees all over the world, working in virtual multicultural teams. Such firms do not need to avoid multicultural teams, working virtually, as they can benefit from this kind of collaboration. Recommendation for Researchers: These results can be also beneficial for academic researchers from different cultures and countries, working together in virtual multicultural teams. Impact on Society: Understanding the positive effect of virtual multicultural teamwork, in mitigating the negative tendency of students from diverse cultures to procrastinate, as concluded in this study, can provide a useful tool for higher education or businesses to mitigate procrastination in teamwork processes. It can also be used as an experiential learning tool for improving task performance and teamwork process. Future Research: The relation between procrastination and motivation should be further examined in relation to multicultural virtual teams. Further research is needed to explore the effect of multicultural virtual teamwork during the teamwork process, and the reasoning for this effect.

Enhancing Global Virtual Small Group Communication Skills

VBP –Virtual Business Professional project was designed to give students real-world experience using communication and collaboration technologies employed in today’s corporate environment to collaborate with team members located around the globe. It uses intercultural workgroup communication theory (Oetzel, 2005) and focuses on communication processes that occur in a multicultural workgroup and affect the workgroup outcomes. Previous studies showed that culturally diverse groups experience significant communication problems and do not reach their performance potential (Earley & Gibson, 2002; Earley & Mosakoski, 2000; Jehn, Northcraft, & Neale, 1999; Ravlin, Thomas, & Ilsev, 2000). Students plan and hold virtual meetings, co-author and collaboratively revise documents, use project management tools, and create business documents. The project started in 2015 as a small collaboration between three schools and two countries, and in spring 2017, it included 415 students and 71 teams from 9 universities and 7 countries. The project uses the functional approach to small group communication to build intercultural communication competence (Deardorff, 2009), and teaches students to work successfully in virtual multicultural teams. The case study will provide an overview of the teaching methodology of the project and discuss how the functional approach applied to the virtual multicultural team project improves (1) team member satisfaction with the project; (2) team coordination, and (3) builds trust in multicultural teams. These measures were chosen to account for three dimensions of measuring the effectiveness of task-oriented groups, (a) task effectiveness, (b) relational effectiveness, and (c) personal effectiveness.

Working with multicultural virtual teams: critical factors for facilitation, satisfaction and success

Information and communication technologies provide the necessary infrastructure for individuals from different cultures and locations to work and learn collaboratively. However the inner workings of such collaboration still keeps its mystery. In this literature review, the issues of how collaborative work comes into being and develops in multicultural virtual teams, the ways to facilitate them and what makes the work in such a team satisfactory and successful are explored. More specifically, how communication works among team members who come from different cultural backgrounds in a context lacking social cues; how potential conflicts due to different cultural understandings on very basic issues are resolved; or how certain notions such as trust is formed, maintained, etc. In pursuit of exploring these concerns, various articles obtained from the conducted literature survey were examined to discover recurring issues. Based on the findings and interpretations from the literature, this paper provides strategies to overcome and leverage similarities and differences inherent in team members. The findings of this literature review are especially important for those people who are planning to organize activities, which involve collaborative multicultural virtual teams.

Leadership emergence in multicultural teams: The power of global characteristics

Building on theories of person-environment fit and on the pattern approach, we hypothesized that emergent leaders in multicultural teams score higher than non-leaders in terms of the three global characteristics, of cultural intelligence, global identity and openness to cultural diversity. We tested this hypothesis on a sample of 317 MBA students who worked on a four-week joint project in virtual multicultural teams. Employing logistic regression analysis, the results revealed that individuals who scored high on the above three global characteristics were significantly more likely to emerge as leaders than were other team members.

Leadership Emergence in Multicultural Teams: The Power of Global Characteristics

This study examines context-dependent characteristics that increase the likelihood of a multicultural team member to emerge as a leader. Building upon theories of context- dependent leadership emergence, we proposed that emergent global leaders should have higher global characteristics than non-leaders, which enable successful adaptation to the global work context. Specifically, cultural intelligence, global identity and openness to diversity served for differentiating between emergent leaders and non-leaders of multicultural teams. Furthermore, following the pattern approach, we proposed that the likelihood of becoming an emergent leader is higher for individuals who score high on all three global characteristics than for individuals who have a mixed pattern or who score low on all three characteristics. Participants were 317 mostly MBA students from 10 Universities in 8 countries assigned to virtual multicultural teams, who worked on a four-week joint project via internet communication means. Using logistic regression analysis, the results revealed that individuals who scored high on the three global characteristics had higher odds to be identified as emergent leaders compared to other team members. These findings support context dependent leadership theories and enrich the research knowledge on global leadership, on global characteristics, and specifically on the characteristics of emergent leaders of multicultural teams.