Cultural diversity and information and communication technology impacts on global virtual teams: An exploratory study.

Modern organizations face many significant challenges because of turbulent environments and a competitive global economy. Among these challenges are the use of information and communication technology (ICT), a multicultural workforce, and organizational designs that involve global virtual teams. Ad hoc teams create both opportunities and challenges for organizations and many organizations are trying to understand how the virtual environment affects team effectiveness. Our exploratory study focused on the effects of cultural diversity and ICT on team effectiveness. Interviews with 41 team members from nine countries employed by a Fortune 500 corporation were analyzed. Results suggested that cultural diversity had a positive influence on decision‐making and a negative influence on communication. ICT mitigated the negative impact on intercultural communication and supported the positive impact on decision making. Effective technologies for intercultural communication included e‐mail, teleconferencing combined with e‐Meetings, and team rooms. Cultural diversity influenced selection of the communication media

Leveraging E-Identities: The Impact of Percieved Diversity on Team Social Integration and Performance

Virtual teams (VTs) are increasingly being employed by organizations, presenting managers and researchers with challenges that collocated teams do not face. VTs are likely to be diverse and lack opportunities to readily communicate personal information to build relationships. Research on team diversity shows mixed results regarding the impact of diversity on team integration and performance, with both positive and negative impacts observed. This study asks the question: Can we minimize the negative impact of perceived deep-level diversity on performance while still leveraging the benefits of actual deep-level diversity? We examine how technology can be used to influence perceptions of deep-level diversity in order to attenuate the negative impact of diversity. Results show that diversity in general, deep-level, attributes can be influenced via the use of eidentity profiles, providing support for the idea that we can minimize social tension due to deep level diversity, while still reaping the benefits from actual diversity

Local Motives and Virtual Team Success: Inverting the Normative Views of Team Goal Commitment and Hidden Agendas

This paper challenges the normative conception of the relationships of team goals and hidden agendas to team performance. In a 23-month participant observation study of a successful multi-organizational virtual team, I found that the members’ actions were consistently motivated by local considerations. Based on these findings, I argue that team goal commitment may be an inappropriate goal for many virtual teams and offer an alternative model for the relationship between a virtual team goal and team performance

Managing Knowledge in Project Environments

Projects ought to be vehicles for both practical benefits and organizational learning. However, if an organization is designed for the long term, a project exists only for its duration. Project-based organizations face an awkward dilemma: the project-centric nature of their work makes knowledge management, hence learning, difficult

Communication Network Design: Balancing Modularity and Mixing via Optimal Graph Spectra

By leveraging information technologies, organizations now have the ability to design their communication networks and crowdsourcing platforms to pursue various performance goals, but existing research on network design does not account for the specific features of social networks, such as the notion of teams. We fill this gap by demonstrating how desirable aspects of organizational structure can be mapped parsimoniously onto the spectrum of the graph Laplacian allowing the specification of structural objectives and build on recent advances in non-convex programming to optimize them. This design framework is general, but we focus here on the problem of creating graphs that balance high modularity and low mixing time, and show how "liaisons" rather than brokers maximize this objective

Information Outlook, September 2004

Volume 8, Issue 9https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2004/1008/thumbnail.jp

Information Outlook, September 2004

Volume 8, Issue 9https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2004/1008/thumbnail.jp

Team Learning: A Theoretical Integration and Review

With the increasing emphasis on work teams as the primary architecture of organizational structure, scholars have begun to focus attention on team learning, the processes that support it, and the important outcomes that depend on it. Although the literature addressing learning in teams is broad, it is also messy and fraught with conceptual confusion. This chapter presents a theoretical integration and review. The goal is to organize theory and research on team learning, identify actionable frameworks and findings, and emphasize promising targets for future research. We emphasize three theoretical foci in our examination of team learning, treating it as multilevel (individual and team, not individual or team), dynamic (iterative and progressive; a process not an outcome), and emergent (outcomes of team learning can manifest in different ways over time). The integrative theoretical heuristic distinguishes team learning process theories, supporting emergent states, team knowledge representations, and respective influences on team performance and effectiveness. Promising directions for theory development and research are discussed

Information Outlook, September 2004

Volume 8, Issue 9https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2004/1008/thumbnail.jp