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Using social categorization perspective, the purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of global identity, perceived proximity, and team interdependence on relational conflict in multicultural distributed teams.

Participants were 317 MBA students in 83 multicultural distributed project teams. Structural equation modeling and bootstrap methods were used to test the study model.

The results demonstrate that the indirect effect of global identity on relational conflict, through the pathway of perceived proximity, is moderated by team interdependence. More specifically, global identity leads to higher perceived proximity and lower relational conflict levels under low, rather than high, interdependence levels.

The particular study context (multicultural distributed MBA student project teams) may limit the extent of the generalization of the findings.

The findings presented here can help practitioners in global organizations to defuse relational conflicts in multicultural distributed teams by embracing a global cultural approach and relying on shared global identity in team building, personnel selection, and development. Additionally, managers should be conscientious when they use the practice of facilitating interdependence between team members and assess the need for other interventions.

This study advances multicultural distributed team research by highlighting the role of global identity in reducing relational conflict, identifying the mediation mechanism of perceived proximity, and the boundary conditions of team interdependence levels under which this attenuation effect prevails.

Distributed performance arrangements are increasingly used by organizations to structure dyadic and team interactions. Unfortunately, distributed teams are no panacea. This chapter reviews some of the advantages and disadvantages associated with the geographical and temporal distribution of team members. An extended discussion of the implications of distributed team performance for individual, team, and organizational decision making is provided, with particular attention paid to selected cultural factors. Best practices and key points are advanced for those stakeholders charged with offsetting the performance decrements in decision making that can result from distribution and culture.

Arguing that it is necessary to look into specific global leadership processes in specific contexts, this article focuses on collective global leadership in self-managed multicultural teams using an input-process-output model. Building on a study of nationally and culturally diverse self-managed teams, our work demonstrates that collective global leadership in these teams is critical for team performance (output). Our study also examines some of the affective or attitudinal antecedents of collective global leadership in self-managed multicultural teams (process) and their members’ goal orientations (input). Our findings suggest that a team learning orientation may greatly help multicultural teams overcome the liability of cultural diversity, create a positive intra-team environment, and enable collective global leadership. Our research also suggests that team performance orientation moderates the above effects.

Purpose – Existing research in organizational behavior and social psychology focuses on comparisons in behaviors and attitudes across national groups, instead of studies on interactions among individuals with different national cultural backgrounds. In this chapter, we hope to motivate efforts within cross-national literatures to address some largely unexamined questions regarding dynamics in multicultural diverse teams.

Design/approach – Through a review of the prior perspectives on multicultural teams and a summary of findings in a recent meta-analysis study on multicultural teams in both single nation and multinational settings, we critique the limitations of the current perspectives and propose a new theoretical framework that draws on status perspectives in sociological and ethological research.

Findings – Drawing from status literatures, we explore how the status construction process and the status differential hierarchy of the team may affect trust, psychological safety, and creative problem solving of complex tasks in multicultural teams.

Originality/value – We propose a new theoretical angle of status for future research on interaction dynamics in multicultural teams, and diverse teams in general.

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.

Increasing digitization has transformed ways of work in modern age. Organizations are increasingly relying on global virtual teams (GVTs) as new forms of working. However, the challenges of configuration of GVTs have been reported to reduce the levels of employee engagement, especially so in multicultural GVTs. Extant research indicates cultural intelligence as one of the drivers of employee engagement in GVTs, though the nature of this relationship has remained unclear. As there is scarce literature on the nature of this relationship, the purpose of this paper is to examine the linkages between cultural intelligence and employee engagement and the authors explain the findings using the identity lens.

This study is an ethnographic inquiry to understand the nature of the relationship between cultural intelligence and employee engagement.

The results of the study indicate that the inclusionary pressures of non-work identities (national culture) are high in context of GVTs owing to their configuration. However, preferences (alignment or misalignment) of team members either initiate gain cycles or loss cycles, thus effecting the levels of employee engagement. Further, it was found that individual preferences may dynamically change from misalignment toward alignment with improved levels of cultural intelligence among team members of GVTs. The relationship between cultural intelligence and employee engagement has been found to be mediated by trust among team members in GVTs.

This is one of the first papers to understand the dynamics of this relationship in an organizational GVT context. The authors also propose a unique framework combining cultural intelligence, trust and employee engagement in the context of GVTs.

The purpose of this study is to map the intellectual structure of the research concerning conflict and conflict management in virtual teams (VT), to contribute to the further integration of knowledge among different streams of research and to develop an interpretative framework to stimulate future research.

A data set of 107 relevant papers on the topic was retrieved using the Web of Science Core Collection database covering a period ranging from 2001 to 2019. A comparative bibliometric analysis consisting of the integration of results from the citation, co-citation and bibliographic coupling was performed to identify the most influential papers. The systematic literature review complemented the bibliometric results by clustering the most influential papers.

The results revealed different intellectual structures across several types of analyses. Despite such differences, 41 papers resulted as the most impactful and provided evidence of the emergence of five thematic clusters: trust, performance, cultural diversity, knowledge management and team management.

Based on the bibliometric analyses an interpretative research agenda has been developed that unveils the main future research avenues. The paper also offers important theoretical contributions by systematizing knowledge on conflict in identifying VTs. Managerial contributions in the form of the identification of best practices are also developed to guide conflict management in VTs.

The uniqueness of this paper is related to its effort in studying, mapping and systematizing the knowledge concerning the topic of handling conflicts in VTs. Considering the current contingencies, this research is particularly timely.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to examine challenges faced by senior construction managers in managing cross‐cultural complexity and uncertainty. The rationale was to identify the key strategies that are considered essential for managing cross‐cultural complexity and uncertainty.

Interviews with 20 senior construction managers, ten in Kenya and ten in the UK, were recorded, transcribed and entered into the qualitative research software NVivo. Validity and reliability were achieved by first assessing the plausibility in terms of already existing knowledge on some of the cultural issues raised by participants. The findings were presented to the participants through workshops and group discussions.

The emerging key issues suggested that project leaders need to learn how to control their own characteristics and to use them selectively. An effective multicultural construction project team should focus on team output and attributes that characterise a multicultural team as a social entity.

Findings indicate that the role of construction project managers has significantly changed over the past two decades. In order to deal with cross‐cultural uncertainty, project leaders must have superior multicultural and interpersonal skills when managing global multicultural heavy engineering projects.

The research shows that leaders of global construction project teams need a good understanding of their culture, environment and the value of their individual contributions.

This study examines how emerging market multinational enterprises operating in the service sector manage knowledge and team members in their overseas subsidiaries and what role expatriates play in their operations.

The authors use a multiple case study design and interview 20 senior managers representing 16 Indian IT firm's subsidiaries in Australia. The onsite-offshore concept and the SECI model are used to explain the knowledge management process.

The findings show that Indian IT firms mostly transfer knowledge from their headquarters in the parent country to their subsidiaries in the host country using the onsite-offshore model where work is divided and coordinated between team members situated between the two locations. Furthermore, the host country subsidiaries have limited independence in decision-making due to a forward, one-way diffusion of knowledge, thus limiting a two-way interaction between the HQ and the subsidiary for opportunities to create and exchange new knowledge.

The study is one of the few to investigate the onsite-offshore phenomenon in service-based emerging market multinational enterprises.