Opening the black box: Challenges and the management of cross-cultural virtual project teams in international projects

Corporations expand their operations beyond the home country borders to gain access to new markets and acquire global talents and resources. International projects are undertaken in such organizations for implementation of various strategic and operational initiatives. When the project teams span beyond country borders the only way to connect with team members will be via virtual means. Team members of such teams will consist of people from various nationalities with different cultural backgrounds. This study is conducted to identify the challenges faced by the managers of such cross-cultural virtual teams (CCVTs) in international projects and to explore the best practices in managing CCVTs. The research modal of this study is developed after reviewing previous literature on CCVT challenges and management. The study is conducted as a deductive research. The data collection was done by interviewing eight interviewees who are managing CCVTs in five international Finnish corporations. All the interviewees manage teams which are geographically dispersed across multiple countries, connecting via virtual means and composed of team members from various national and cultural backgrounds. The interview questions were designed to understand the challenges the interviewees face in managing their respective CCVTs and strategies/mechanisms they use to tackle the challenges. The research modal is validated using the empirical data collected using these qualitative interviews. After the empirical data analysis it is deduced that empathy, effective communication, addressing elements of motivation and collaborative conflict resolution strategies help reducing overall challenges of communication, frequency of conflicts, and motivation issues in CCVTs. The study identifies that it is important for CCVT managers to be culturally empathetic and have openness to learn about cultural differences specially related to communication, way of work and motivation. That would help connecting with team members and better management of CCVTs. CCVTs have frequent and higher rate of virtual meetings. Therefore systematic management of virtual meetings is essential to make the meetings fruitful. Collaborative conflict resolution strategy is identified as most used strategy for conflict resolution of CCVTs. It is also identified that CCVTs who have worked together for longer periods and/or have met physically during some instances have developed greater team bonds comparatively.