The impact of national cultural diversity on collaboration-enhancing factors within global virtual teams : a Volvo Construction Equipment case study

More and more companies are making use of the advances in technologies to create teams working in a virtual environment. Such a work structure has many advantages but also many challenges than can be responsible for team failure. This is even more so the case with culturally diverse teams, i.e. global virtual teams. The core research question of this research is: what is the impact of national cultural diversity on collaboration-enhancing factors within global virtual teams? This study was split into various phases. The first one was used to create a literature review of what researchers consider as collaboration-enhancing factors. Those factors were split into two main categories. The first one, called socio-emotional factors, comprises the factors of depth of relationship and trust. The second category, called communication & technological factors, is made of 3 elements: the selection of communication media, the coordination of efforts and the shared meaning context. The second phase took care of analyzing those factors and their perceptions within a global virtual team case study, in Volvo Construction Equipment and over four countries (Sweden, USA, Germany and South Korea). For this we followed one of their project taking care of a new engine development, using both qualitative and quantitative dta, with a predominance with the latter. The main tool used to gather data was a survey. The results overall were positive, even though some areas for improvement were identified due to more important levels of negative perceptions. Our hypothesis, stating a negative link between cultural diversity and the aforementioned factors, was verified. This was done through the comparison of levels of negative perceptions for countries groups. The conclusion was that the more culturally diverse a team is, the more complex collaboration is. The last and final step of this research consisted in providing two final recommendations on how to improve the challenges found in the previous phase. One of those recommendations was centered around using a better upstream meeting preparation process and was to be applied to all team members. We decided to create a second recommendation applicable for the specific case of the relationship between Sweden and South Korea, which proved to be most problematic. This was centered on organizing face-to-face cross-cultural communication training with the Swedish and South Korean team members.