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The Challenge of Multicultural Communication in Virtual Teams

Article  in  Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences · January 2014

DOI: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.12.473

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Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 109 (2014) 365 – 369

2nd World Conference On Business, Economics And Management -
WCBEM 2013

The challenge of multicultural communication in virtual teams

Vasile Duran a *, Anca-Diana Popescub
ab
Politehnica University of Timisoara, Management Faculty, 14 Remus str., 300191 Timisoara, Romania

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze Collaborative Virtual Teams by taking into consideration items as national culture members’ impact
upon the whole team and linguistic members ‘characteristics. At the beginning it is made a concepts description and analyzed the
cross-cultural advantage as it appear in relevant references. The research paper is based on a questionnaire, by characterizing
teams’ cultural aspects. The collaboration in the collaborative virtual teams depends on how the cultural diversity is managed.

© 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.
Selection and peer review under responsibility of Organizing Committee of BEM 2013.
Keywords: Virtual teams, Multicultural communication, performance criteria, Statistics results;

1. Introduction

By taking into account the specific needs in term of communication and information, knowledge exchange
between different services or qualifications employees is required inciting the participants for having a collaborative
behavior. The collaboration it is defined by America English Dictionary as being an action to work together,
especially for joint intellectual efforts. The four steps model better explains collaboration process. This collaboration
process includes: projection, data collection, design and action processing.
Information and communication technologies (ICT) helped at the virtual team creation, a new type of working
team. Virtual teams are used by different organizations for increasing efficiency in vast activities domains, such as
research and development, knowledge management, learning and training, manufacturing, marketing and others.
There are some obvious virtual teams’ advantages: people no longer have to work in the same place, participants can
be involved in task attendance from any location around the globe, in any moment of day or night.
Because virtual teams breaks the time and space barriers, can also utilizes at maximum the members experience
from the organization. Taking into consideration such characteristics, virtual teams have a huge potential for
improving the organizational efficiency.
In this context, a group of workers spread organizational and/or geographically gather to work together on a
common project, via communicational and informational technology is considered to be a virtual team (Townsend,
DeMarie and Hendrickson, 1998, Koulopoulos and Frappaolo, 1999). A virtual team makes all most the interactions
by electronic means (Grosse, 2002) by having only few face-to-face meetings or none if its members are not in the

* Corresponding Author: Vasile Duran. Tel.: +40 256 433078

E-mail address: vasile.duran@yahoo.com

1877-0428 © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.
Selection and peer review under responsibility of Organizing Committee of BEM 2013.
doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.12.473
366 Vasile Duran and Anca-Diana Popescu / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 109 (2014) 365 – 369

same physical space. The members can be from different organizations, being together because they have common
interests and trying to find a common solution to a certain problem (Godar and Ferris, 2004).

2. Multicultural aspects

What is the connection between culture and virtual teams’ management? Multiculturalism primarily affects
processes within virtual teams and manager’s skills management leading this area.
Lüsebrink (2005) defines the multiculturalism as being, from the anthropological sense, different cultures
cohabitation in a social system during a peaceful and conflict coexistence. "Cultural diversity refers to the
harmonious coexistence and different people’s interaction that culture should be regarded as a set of distinctive
spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group and supplements, in addition to art
and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs "- UNESCO Universal
Declaration on Cultural Diversity.

2.1. Cultural aspects in the collaborative virtual teams

Social culture is defined as the pattern of values, traits or behaviors shared by the people in a region (Hofstede,
1997; Schneider, 1989). In international management research, culture term has been largely increased throughout
the years. This thing happened also in the research field. There are four major culture dimensions have been
identified by Hofstede (1997). Those values are: power distance (or the limit at which people can accept authority
and the difference in society), uncertainty avoidance (avoiding the ambiguous situations), individualism (the self
concept of being or becoming independent persons or the dependence to a specific group) and masculinity versus
feminine values.
Collaborative virtual teams are aware of their own culture and can make progress to understand other cultures.
This will be possible in the future by learning and knowing how to build trust with people from different cultures.
The ideal to achieve: no borders between cultures.

2.1.1. Trust in collaborative virtual teams

Communication in collaborative virtual teams is not based on language or body language. In this case, very easily
misunderstandings can become a difficult problem. For a collaborative team environment, three aspects must be
taking into consideration: people, process and technology. Trust is the most important aspect for a successful team.
The communication is the most important element in building trust between the teams’ members. Only having trust,
people will be able to understand and rely on each other. Trust is the successful ingredient in a virtual workplace.

3. Survey method used in the research

In the research paper, data were collected using a questionnaire of a sample counting over 40 subjects employed
in multinational companies and in the “Politehnica” University of Timisoara (male, females of different ages and
educational background).
The following variables were used in the questionnaire: subjects’ average age (the research average was between
20-30 years old (33%)), gender (54% of the participants were male, while 46% were female as in Fig. 1) and
nationality (most of the subjects have Romanian nationality and only 5% were Serbian and Hungarian).
The questionnaire was sent via e-mail to all the members from the collaborative virtual teams. Questionnaire
results were captured using an on-line tool and all the results were store in a database.
 Vasile Duran and Anca-Diana Popescu / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 109 (2014) 365 – 369 367

Members gender

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Male
Female

Fig. 1 Members gender

The presented research was inspired by the survey of Anawati and Craig (2006). The questions that are correlated
to our research objectives were:
• In which way do you adapt your behavior when working in a cross-cultural team?
• Should the other team members be aware of your culture?
• Do you consider that inter and multicultural work shows benefits?

4. Research results and conclusions

In the following there are presented the research results.

Table 1. In which way do you adapt your behavior when working in a cross cultural team?
*) Note: Some subjects choose multiple checkboxes; % results may sum up more than 100%.

Options No. Percentage* [%]

Humour as important 11 46%
part of the social life

Confirm understanding 8 33%

Ask open questions to 11 46%

check understanding

Repeating with own 5 21%

words to check
understanding

Others 2 8%
368 Vasile Duran and Anca-Diana Popescu / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 109 (2014) 365 – 369

Conclusion 1 (correlated with Hypothesis 1): Most of the subjects adapt their behavior using humor as important
part of the social life, using extra and open questions for avoiding the misunderstandings that may appear inside the
collaborative virtual teams. The subjects ask open questions to check and understand the message in the work and
task situation.

Should other team members be aware of your

culture ?



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Figure 2 Should other team members be aware of your culture?

Conclusion 2 (correlated with Hypothesis 2): most of the subjects don’t emphasize the culture aspects. From the
answers received it’s showed that the subjects try to have a cross border communication.
Conclusion 3 (correlated with Hypothesis 3): Most of the subjects (96%) appreciate the benefits in an
intercultural/multicultural work; at the opposite part there are only 4% (as it is represented in Fig. 3).

Do you believe that intercultural/

multicultural work shows benefits ?

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Fig. 3 Benefits in intercultural/multicultural work

 Vasile Duran and Anca-Diana Popescu / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 109 (2014) 365 – 369 369

The research is based on some cultural aspects characterization in collaborative virtual teams. This research
underlined the fact that it is extremely difficult to create formal cultural topics because, at the end, might be different
reactions from the subjects. When the virtual teams’ members are wearing in a tolerant and permissive way, the
cultural difficulties are not so big as usually.
The task will be accomplished successfully and in time only if there is an involvement in a common task and
according to the required demands. Very good supports for the multicultural collaboration process are the
collaborative tools. Even if there are provided useful support for collaborative virtual teams, indispensable still
remain the classic face-to-face meetings. In the research were underlined two big perspectives: culture as an accent
on the team culture (or the partners, collaborators) and the culture as a transition stage.

References

Anawati D., Craig A. (2006). Behavioral Adaptation within Cross-Cultural Virtual Teams. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication,
vol.49, no 1, pp.44-56.
Godar S., Ferris S. P. (2004). Virtual and Collaborative Teams, Idea Group Publishing, USA, 34, Influence of Multi-culturally in Virtual Teams.
Grosse C. U. (2002). Managing Communication within Virtual Intercultural Teams. Business Communication Quarterly. 65 (4), pp.22-39.
Hofstede G., Vermunt A., Smits M., Noorderhaven N. (1997). Wired International Teams: Experiments in Strategic Decision Making by Multi-
Cultural Virtual Teams. In: Galliers R. et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth European Conference on Information Systems, vol I, Cork
Publishing, Ireland, pp.321-336.
Koulopoulos T., Frappaolo C. (eds.) (1999). Smart Things to Know About Knowlede Management, Capstone Publishing Limited, United
Kingdom.
Schneider W. E. (2000). Why Good Management Ideas Fails: The Neglected Power of Organizational Culture. Strategy & Leadership, vol 4(3),
pp. 14-23.
Townsend A., DeMarie S., Hendrickson A. (1998). Virtual Teams: Technology and the Workplace of the Future. Academy of Management
Executive, 12(3), pp.17-29.

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