Exploring How Engineering Students Respond to Challenges While Working in Global Virtual Teams

Challenges, Barriers, and Obstacles Facing Virtual Teams: a Conceptual Study

“…One of the basic difficulties of virtuality is team communication. Moreover, it has been highlighted that the results of the Joshi et al (2022) study closely match those of other researches that found that the key difficulty with virtual teams is communication. There are a variety of reasons for the virtual team members' poor communication.…”

“…It was discovered that non-linguistic individuals are less integrated and cooperative with the rest of the team, while language-impaired individuals found it challenging to present ideas to their colleagues in order to come to a consensus, and language-skilled individuals felt dissatisfied with the level of cooperation and idea transfer in the team (Abd Shaheen and Alzubaidy, 2022). Similar to the previous study conducted on international virtual teams, communication was found to be problematic, and one of the main reasons for poor communication was the language barrier (Joshi et al, 2022). Individual levels of trust were notable found to be lower for multicultural teams during the virtual team lifespan while higher for unicultural teams, mostly due to linguistic, behavioural, and value differences (Swart et al, 2022).…”

“…Team bonding may be weak due to ineffective communication and feelings of isolation. The inability to transmit non-verbal messages and tones is another crucial problem with technology-assisted communication, which negatively affects the effectiveness of virtual teams (Eaidgah et al, 2018;Soon and Salamzadeh, 2020;Elyousfi et al, 2021;Agbi, 2018;Joshi et al, 2022). According to Shameem et al (2017), inadequate IT infrastructure is another significant barrier to productivity for virtual teams.…”

“…Trust, motivation, and conflict are a few examples of the social and emotional aspects that are closely related to these characteristics (Morrison-Smith and Ruiz, 2020b). Global virtual teams are a viable business strategy, but when organizing these types of strategies issues around cultural diversity, language barriers, team conflicts, and project management must be addressed (Joshi et al, 2022).…”

“…One study found that there are main challenges that determine the success of virtual teams: geographical distance, time distance, perceived distance, formation of virtual teams, and diversity of virtual team members (Morrison-Smith and Ruiz, 2020a). Furthermore, there are a number of factors that affect how well traditional team, including the quality factor, budget, and project schedule in addition to project management, but when used global virtual teams (GVTs), several new factors have emerged to the interface that affect the performance of the virtual team, including the multiplicity of work sites as a result of geographical differences as well as other factors, such as different cultures, language differences, the difficulty of communication between individuals (Abd Shaheen and Alzubaidy, 2022;Youssef et al, 2022;Joshi et al, 2022). The current study contributes to strengthening theoretical studies on the challenges facing the success of virtual teams, whose employment has increased in many organizations and companies of varying activity and size.…”