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“Organizational identification” refers to a perception of “oneness” with an organization. The purpose of this paper is to provide a model of organizational identification for virtual team workers and examine the role of cultural dimensions in a virtual setting. Specifically, it poses individualism‐collectivism and uncertainty avoidance as potential situational contingencies that may affect the determinants of an organizational identification relationship in a virtual work setting.

The proposed research framework delineates how cultural dimensions relate to virtual work‐associated individual (interpersonal trust, need for affiliation) and environmental (spatial and cultural dispersion, ICT‐enabled communication) factors and organizational identification. Several testable propositions emerge.

This study provides a foundation for empirical studies that examine the linkages among organizational identification, virtual work, and environment‐related factors and cultural variables.

This study has particular implications for managing virtual teams, as well as specific suggestions for a typology of virtual team members. The typology supports a consideration of expected levels of organizational identification, depending on virtual team member types.

Scholars have devoted very little attention to exploring what factors drive or impede organizational identification in cross‐cultural virtual teams. This paper attempts to fill that void by linking the immediate determinants and the contingency role of cultural variables or organizational identification in the context of virtual work.

We propose team-based organizing as an alternative to more traditional forms of hierarchy-based organizing in global firms.

Advancements in the study of global teams, leadership, process, and outcomes were organized into four themes: (1) openness toward linguistic and value diversity as enhancing team creativity and performance, (2) knowledge sharing in team-based organizations, (3) the significance of social capital for global team leader role success, and (4) shared leadership, satisfaction, and performance links in global virtual teams.

We identify questions at three levels for bringing research on team-based organizing in global organizations forward. At the within-team individual level, we discuss the criticality of process and leadership in teams. At the between-teams group level, we draw attention to that global teams also need to focus on relationships and interactions with other teams within the same global firm, for example, when sharing knowledge. With respect to the across-teams organizational level, we highlight how bringing people together in global teams from different organizational units and cultures creates the potential for experiential individual and team-based learning, while making the firm more flexible and adaptable.

The potential of the relatively underexplored idea of global team-based firms as an alternative to hierarchy open up questions for empirical research, and further theorizing about the global firm.

Practitioners can learn about organizational, team, and individual challenges and benefits of global team-based organizing.

A century-old dominant organizational form is challenged when moving away from hierarchy- and hybrid-based forms of organizing toward team-based global organizing of work.

In this chapter, we focus on virtual teams and emotions during postmerger and acquisition (M&A) integration. Our main research question is “How to manage emotions and virtual teams following cross-border M&A?”. We answer this question through the following research subquestions: (1) What virtual interaction can be identified post-M&A?; (2) What emotions arises from virtual communication; and (3) What emotions and challenges do virtual teams encounter following cross-border M&As? This research is based on a single case study. The main findings imply that emotions, trust, and cultural differences play an important role in virtual interaction following a cross-border M&A.

Ongoing advancements in technology provide the opportunity to build and to improve successful virtual teams. Organizational leaders are facing a dynamic and competitive environment that requires levels of flexibility and fast responses to the global marketplace. The virtual team structure is built on communication that is impacted by the ability of the team members to engage with integrated collaborative technology. Advances in technology enable team members of virtual teams to communicate crucial information and to be perceived as inclusive. Communication technologies have characteristics and capabilities that allow for different levels of communication richness, which refers to the quantity and quality of the shared information provided by the technology. There are two broad categories of collaboration technology: communication-focused technology and coordination-focused technology. Communication-focused technologies are considered key contributors to building trust in virtual teams. Coordination-focused technology refers to a complementary set of tools that can be leveraged to enhance trust and coordination among team members. Advances in technology that are discussed: real-time communications protocols enhances video calls through any type of device including wearable technology; Internet of Things making it easier and more natural for people to interact with the objects to stay connected; higher video resolution continues to improve in terms of price, quality, and performance, which will increase the number and type of devices for communication.

There is a generalized belief that cultural differences can have more negative consequences than benefits within the international business (IB) literature. This study argues that cultural differences are not perceived as constrains in millennial global virtual teams (GVTs). Additionally, using the theory of cooperation and competition and the motivated information processing perspective, the purpose of this paper is to uncover the process by which millennials working in GVTs address various challenges to ensure effective functioning and accomplishment of desired team outcomes.

This paper analyzes a data set of 503 project journals from the global enterprise experience, a virtual team competition. It uses qualitative content analysis tools and secondary data sources.

The authors find that for millennials, cross-cultural issues are not the predominant challenge when working in GVTs, unlike the prevailing understanding in the IB literature. This is because contrary to expectations, cross-cultural problems are often not experienced, while other team phenomena become more relevant, such as interpersonal and task-based issues. In addition, the paper describes how members of GVTs apply distinct challenge reconstruction and solution generation cognitive schemes to deal with both, expected and unexpected challenges.

This study contributes to the literature on virtual teams by identifying how millennials and post-millennials deal with the challenges embedded in the GVT interaction context by simplifying the unfamiliarity associated with the broader context rather than addressing each issue in isolation. Finally, the paper elaborates on factors that highlight the positive outcomes of multicultural teams while making cultural differences less salient in contemporary GVT contexts.

In this study, we examine the developments of transactive memory systems and collective mind and their influence on performance in virtual teams. Although one of the oft‐cited benefits of the virtual team is the ability of its members to contribute diverse knowledge and expertise, the question of how virtual team members can bring their respective knowledge and expertise to solve the problems they face has been largely ignored in the past research on virtual teams. Building on an emerging body of socio‐cognitive literature, we argue that transactive memory systems and the collective mind are two important variables that explain team performance. We tested our hypotheses with a longitudinal data set that was collected from 38 virtual teams of graduate management students from six universities in four countries over eight weeks. The results suggest that the influence of team members' early communication volume on team performance decreases as teams develop transactive memory systems and a collective mind. The results further suggest that the development of a collective mind represents a high‐order learning in team settings.

Performance 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.

The 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.

The 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.

The 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.

This paper presents an action learning‐based case study investigating how one virtual team leader coped with a number of issues associated with the completion of a critical organizational task in a virtual environment. Exploring this one virtual team leader’s experiences and strategies opens a window for both practitioners and researchers. The insights shared by the team leader may lead to practical virtual team leadership strategies as well as avenues to research into virtual team leadership. The paper concludes with a discussion highlighting the important practical lessons learned about virtual team leadership and implications for practitioners and researchers.

Virtual collaboration provides students with an opportunity to develop cultural intelligence while fitting into the team where the members are from diverse cultures. The purpose of this study is to explore whether global virtual team (GVT) projects raise students' understanding of cultural differences. In addition, it is interesting to know how internationally disruptive events such as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic influence GVT projects.

The research involved two parts: In the first part, a two-wave longitudinal study was conducted to investigate how intercultural sensitivity and intercultural communication competence coevolve within a group of international students enrolled in a virtual business professional project. In the second part, using word clouds and topic modelling on the participants' perceptions, the study investigated whether the sudden disruption caused by the pandemic show similar results in performance, focussing primarily on the resilience of virtual teams. Further, the study explored participants' perceptions towards online learning in higher education institutions as well as the attitude of corporate organizations towards remote working in the post-pandemic years.

The results confirmed that GVT projects, in fact, do raise students' understanding of cultural differences and the need to adjust their behaviour accordingly in order to engage with their culturally different counterparts effectively. Participants reported an increase in their cognitive, behavioural and affective attributes.

Among the limitations of this study is the relatively small number of student participants. Furthermore, the number of respondents from India dominated the sample. Since the Indian students were disproportionately affected by the shutdown, causing them to return often to rural areas with poor Internet connectivity, responses concerning the disruption caused by the pandemic may be overriding negative. The same could be said of responses from US-American students, who often rely heavily on-campus employment or whose parents became unemployed during the pandemic, and thus were faced with disproportionate economic insecurity.

This paper provides insights to the educators and international organizations on how such projects provide the skills essential for reducing costs, accessing knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) across borders, maintaining flexible work schedules and arrangements, and taking advantage of multiple time zones to increase productivity.

While highlighting the significance of cultural intelligence, this paper investigated how the sudden disruption caused by a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic impacts performance, focussing primarily on the resilience of virtual teams.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the interrelation between language differences, media choice and social categorization in global virtual teams (GVTs).

An ethnographic field work was conducted in a Finnish multinational corporation (MNC). The study included interviews, observations, and language proficiency assessment of 27 GVT members located in five European countries.

In GVTs, the combination of language proficiency differences and verbal media (e.g. telephone) tends to lead to social categorization, while a similar effect was not found when GVT members chose written media (e.g. e-mail).

The qualitative study only consisted of GVTs from one MNC, and thus the empirical findings might not be generalizable to other MNCs. Therefore, quantitative studies that can add to the robustness of the exploratory findings could be a worthwhile endeavour.

Language training should be provided to GVT members, and virtual policies should be implemented to ensure the use of written media in GVTs characterized by language proficiency differences.

Although it is well established in the literature that language differences are detrimental to co-located team effectiveness no study has explored how the relationship between variation in language proficiency and media choice affects social categorization in GVTs.