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Distributed teamwork has become commonplace within and among organizations. Indeed, nearly two-thirds of U.S. employees have engaged in virtual work. These individuals often work as part of a distributed team that consists of members from various cultural and national backgrounds.
Distributed teamwork has become commonplace within and among organizations. Indeed, nearly two-thirds of U.S. employees have engaged in virtual work. These individuals often work as part of a distributed team that consists of members from various cultural and national backgrounds.
Research showed that diverse and distributed teams are becoming the norm for businesses and governments around the world because of the increased opportunities they provide. Although team members may work across major time zone differences, across internal business units, and across cultures, they can perform effectively.
Although the ability to use a wider resource base may be an advantage of MNMC distributed teams, these teams can present some challenges. Some researchers warn that 50 per cent of virtual teams would fail to meet either strategic or operational objectives due to the inability to manage the distributed workforce implementation risks. Also, the demands of working in a MNMC distributed team can be taxing to team members. As one professional explains in an article depicting her MNMC distributed team experiences, “There are delays in response and communication, and in such cases I might lose a day instead of a few hours… Communication and collaboration can take up a significant chunk of project time”. Understanding how to maintain effective MNMC distributed teams that meet the needs of both the team members and organization presents a challenge to both practitioners and researchers.
The current work on MNMC distributed teams, however, often has focused on a geographical facet, conceiving of culture in terms of broad national differences. Hofstede’s work is very often used to assess cultural differences in teams;
This paragraph is about research that is done on MNMC distributed teams and culture. There appears to be a strong focus on nationality when investigating culture in this body of research, and several researchers rely on Hofstede’s dimensions. Scholars also examine team composition, often referred to as cultural heterogeneity. Some findings suggest that cultural differences matter, whereas other research suggests that they may not in teams that experience high trust or regular communication. Further research exploring these issues is needed.
Distance is viewed as both a challenge and as a nonissue to MNMC distributed teams. Although some work continues to frame distribution as a constraint, some empirical findings suggest that distribution does not impair MNMC distributed team collaboration or performance. This variation points to the need for future research to clarify the role of distribution and its effects (or lack thereof) on team processes and outcomes. Moreover, it should be noted that generally, previous empirical research on MNMC distributed teams tends to treat distance as a discrete difference (i.e., the team is distributed or it is not distributed). Although few empirical studies explicitly frame distance as a step function, an implicit argument in several articles reviewed here is that greater distance places more constraints on teams.
Scholars interested in MNMC distributed teams have examined several topics, See Table 1. Some of these topics are highlighted in the articl:
MNMC distributed teams have several features
A team’s degree of virtuality relates to the richness of the communication media typically used by members to accomplish tasks and the extent to which team members are separated by time and space.
Third, future research must look at how a multifaceted view of culture and these complexities of distribution relate to each other in influencing team processes and outcomes. For example, in combining the complexities of distribution (partially vs. fully distributed) with the complexities of culture, one may wonder if a team that is partially distributed may be challenged (or enhanced) by the subcultures that may arise as a result of different locations.
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