Considering that international projects with teams in the virtual environment (IPTVEs) contribute to the reduction in the carbon footprint and, at the same time, become life-saving solutions in extreme global situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations familiar with this type of project will have a substantial advantage in their ability to operate efficiently and to achieve their sustainable goals. An important aspect of project management is to identify the factors that influence the success of an international project, increasing its performance. Our first research hypothesis was that the decision to create a project team in the virtual environment is a factor with a major influence on international project success. Data collection was performed through an online survey conducted within international project team members and managers. The success factors were explained through factorial analysis which revealed two main factors and the neural network algorithm on a dataset through IBM SPSS Modeler software. The predictive model revealed that the most important field is setting up a virtual team, followed by organizational culture. These results support our hypothesis.

International projects have helped organizations around the world to better adapt to the new environmental conditions in which they operate, driven by the phenomenon of globalization. Electronic communication and information tools have enabled the creation of international virtual project teams (IVPTs), allowing team members to collaborate regardless of their geographic location or cultural, historical, socio-political, and educational differences. However, such an environment characterized by diversity will be productive only if the project team managers acknowledge and understand the behavior of influence factors comprised by the virtual environment, developing, accordingly, strategies that support team performance. In order to analyze the factors that influence IVPT performance, we used a C5.0 algorithm on the dataset through IBM SPSS Modeler software. Data collection was performed through an online survey, conducted within 107 IVPT members and managers, in order to answer the third question of the research. The predictive model created by the data mining algorithm revealed that the most important fields underlying the decision tree building were the cognitive skills training programs, team culture, and selection of IVPT members based on the characterisics of their national cultures. These results demonstrate the hypothesis that culture represents one of the most important factors influencing team performance.

Abstract. The expansion of internet access, high-speed connection services, collaborative work platforms and tools, allowed employees to interact virtually offering companies the possibility to develop projects around the world, reducing operational costs and gain competitive advantage. Realizing the advantages and disadvantages of developing a project team in an international virtual work environment, requires adopting specific strategies to construct an effective team and ensure the project success. One of the most important disadvantages that we identified is that the new work environment brings new risks for both team members and managers. So, it becomes mandatory to identify and analyze the occupational emerging risks and their impact on the productivity of virtual team members, in order to prevent them efficiently and to ensure the safety and health of employees in a virtual working environment. This paper aims to highlight the necessity for project managers and organizations, to include in their specific project strategies, an efficient occupational risks management in the virtual workplace, to obtain a continuously improved virtual working environment, so to achieve a high performance from virtual employees.

With the advance of technology, face-to-face intercultural communication moves into the online virtual environment via electronic tools such as audio-video conferencing, email, messenger chat, platforms, groups, thus distances between individuals from different cultures are reduced and the exchange of information takes place within a few seconds. Cultural differences should not be a barrier to communication but an opportunity for development. International virtual project teams (IVPTs) can benefit from cultural diversity and effective intercultural communication, because it can enhance creativity and innovation within the project team, while at the same time team members are enriched by acquiring intercultural information and developing intercultural skills. So, it becomes mandatory to understand how intercultural communication takes place in a virtual environment, which are the most important challenges and how they can be overcome. This paper aims to highlight the importance of an effective intercultural communication, the role of intercultural communication skills and which are the characteristics of intercultural communicators. In order to analyze some cultural diversity aspects within IVPTs (number of project languages used, efficiency of different online collaboration tools, misunderstandings generated by cultural diversity), an empirical research was conducted, through an online survey within 107 IVPT members. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics through IBM SPSS Statistics software.

Systemic thinking is an instrument used in any field to understand the complexity of the changes and challenges that take place, and to discover the reciprocal links and conditions between the internal elements that determine the functioning of the system. Understanding how the international project with virtual project teams works as a system can help us better address the issues that arise in managing it, helping to increase the success rate. The international project with teams in the virtual environment, due to the diversity it embraces, in various aspects, especially at the cultural level, is considered a complex system, and can be seen as a system of systems. This term applies to systems in which interactions that could appear between different elements and deliverables are difficult to represent by a mathematical model or to be anticipated. In order to highlight the complexity of the international project system, we chose to represent project management in the virtual environment as a subsystem through the subsystems that compose it. This graphic representation can be used as a theoretical model of how to manage an international project with teams in the virtual environment.