The Impact of Cultural Diversity on Global Virtual Team Collaboration A Social Identity Perspective

Global Virtual Teams (GVTs) – teams with geographically and temporally dispersed members who heavily rely on computer-mediated communications (CMC) – face significant collaboration challenges associated with cultural diversity. From the social identity perspective, we investigated the impact of GVT members’ cultural individualism/collectivism (I/C) and language identities on their participation in team collaboration. A field experiment involving 33 GVTs was conducted to test our hypotheses. The results indicated that when a team’s identity faultlines are strong, its members’ I/C and Language identities have significant impact on their levels and forms of participation; and that communication media have significant interaction effects on these relationships.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: HICSS
• Authors: Yu-Ting Caisy Hung, Mary Thi Thao Duyen Nguyen
• Keywords: Biometrics, Face Significant Collaboration, Global Virtual Teams, HICSS 2008, Language Identities, System Sciences