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

By Pnina Shachaf. Information Manager (The), 2008

508 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Communication, Management of Technology and Innovation, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/09dc21ad758a4102b22b6f6cef6eb8ad44fabe3f

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In Communication

In Management of Technology and Innovation

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Framing the Effects of Multinational Cultural Diversity on Virtual Team Processes (2016, background): “However, scholars have agreed that cultural diversity is a critical dimension in VTs (Gibson & Gibbs, 2006; Krumm, Terwiel, & Hertel, 2013; Shachaf, 2008; Staples & Zhao, 2006).”
Trust and knowledge sharing in diverse global virtual teams (2013, background): “Diversity due to demographic differences such as age, sex, or race, is termed surface level diversity, whereas diversity due to personal characteristics, such as idiosyncratic attitudes, values, and preferences are termed deep-level diversity [27].”
Virtual Teams: A Literature Review (2009, background): “Synchronous written documents helped virtual teams overcome challenges associated with s poken language, and this enabled teams to overcome challenges associated with asynchronous and lean written communication (Shachaf, 2008).”