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”CULTURAL DIVERSITY”, VOLUMUL II 2017 ONLINE
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INTERNATIONAL CONFERECNCE ”CULTURAL DIVERSITY”, JUNE, 2017, ROMANIA.
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The shift towards virtual organisation is related with a fundamental change in organising and managing daily operations. The success of collaborative work therefore relies not merely on the introduction of different technologies, but also on critically analysing the “human” aspects of organisation. Virtual teams bring people together across disciplines, departments, functions, and geographical locations. This paper draws on the literature with respect to organisational change, and particularly results from human and organisational research carried out in the OSMOS (IST-1999-10491) project. Within the context of the OSMOS project, interviews with senior managers of each of the participating industrial organisations were conducted. From the analysis of these interviews four major organisational issues emerged, which virtual teams or e-businesses need to address before moving forward. These are: information sharing, organisational culture and teamworking, acceptance of change and training. The paper investigates the above issues and explores potential solutions in order to support virtual organisations and e-businesses in dealing with continuous change. From this investigation the paper proposes critical success factors that the authors believe to be necessary in dealing with such change.
Purpose – This paper seeks to present the challenges reported by project leaders of cross-cultural geographically distributed, or virtual project teams operating within the matrix organisation of ABC, a multinational company based in Switzerland. Design/methodology/approach – The research is qualitative and exploratory, taking the form of inductive thematic analysis. Findings – The key themes reported to be of significance were the challenge of leadership, managing virtual aspects of communication and developing trust. Sub-themes consisted of managing the task, managing people, managing language and cultural issues and, lastly, managing the matrix. Practical implications – These include attention to the selection of leaders, continued facilitation of face-to-face communication in a virtual age and investment in language and intercultural training. Originality/value – Future research might investigate the complementary perspective of line management and take up the theme of high fluctuation of team members and leaders.
The challenges of managing cross-cultural virtual project teams. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235263716_The_challenges_of_managing_cross-cultural_virtual_project_teams [accessed May 10, 2015].
The bulk of our understanding of teams is based on traditional teams in which all members are collocated and communicate face to face. However, geographically distributed teams, whose members are not collocated and must often communicate via technology, are growing in prevalence. Studies from the field are beginning to suggest that geographically distributed teams operate differently and experience different outcomes than traditional teams. For example, empirical studies suggest that distributed teams experience high levels of conflict. These empirical studies offer rich and valuable descriptions of this conflict, but they do not systematically identify the mechanisms by which conflict is engendered in distributed teams. In this paper, we develop a theory-based explanation of how geographical distribution provokes team-level conflict. We do so by considering the two characteristics that distinguish distributed teams from traditional ones: Namely, we examine how being distant from one's team members and relying on technology to mediate communication and collaborative work impacts team members. Our analysis identifies antecedents to conflict that are unique to distributed teams. We predict that conflict of all types (task, affective, and process) will be detrimental to the performance of distributed teams, a result that is contrary to much research on traditional teams. We also investigate conflict as a dynamic process to determine how teams might mitigate these negative impacts over time.
This study seeks to determine a definition and appropriate assessment methods of inter-cultural competence as agreed on by a panel of internationally known intercultural scholars. This information is validated by a sample of higher education administrators and can be used by administrators in identifying and assessing intercultural competence as a student outcome of internationalization efforts. Conclusions made from this study include identified elements of intercultural competence and assessment methods on which both the intercultural scholars and administrators agreed, resulting in the first study to document consensus on intercultural competence. Both groups agree that it is possible to assess degrees of intercultural competence and in so doing, that it is best to use a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to assess intercultural competence, including interviews, observation, and judgment by self and others. Two models of inter-cultural competence are presented based on the findings of the study.