Teaching Virtual and Cross-Cultural Collaborations: Exploring Experiences of Croatia- and U.S.-Based Undergraduate Students

Abstract

Two important characteristics of contemporary teamwork are working with colleagues from diverse cultural backgrounds and working in virtual teams. Hence, preparing students to successfully navigate through the business world must include developing these two skills. To investigate learning for both cross-cultural and virtual collaboration, we conducted a cross-cultural virtual team experiential exercise with 635 undergraduate students comprising 189 teams. The exercise was part of Organizational Behavior classes at three university campuses—two in the United States and one in Croatia. Data analysis examining skills development and efficacy demonstrated a significant increase in virtual team efficacy for all students and a significant increase in cross-cultural efficacy for students in Croatia. Qualitative results point to differences in key lessons learned between U.S. and Croatian students, such as communication skills, time management skills, and intensity of the experience. We provide a description of the exercise, lessons learned, and suggestions for future use, including adaptations to smaller class sizes.

Sustainable Virtual Teams: Promoting Well-Being through Affect Management Training and Openness to Experience Configurations

“…To be sustainable, virtual teams need to experience well-being, which leads to team effectiveness. However, scholars continually try to identify new ways to improve the sustainability of team members operating in virtual environments [12]. Their dispersion leads to high diversity [11,12] in terms of personality, demographics, or educational Sustainability 2021, 13, 3491 2 of 22 background, among others.…”

“…However, scholars continually try to identify new ways to improve the sustainability of team members operating in virtual environments [12]. Their dispersion leads to high diversity [11,12] in terms of personality, demographics, or educational Sustainability 2021, 13, 3491 2 of 22 background, among others. Diversity may have positive effects on team results [12][13][14][15].…”

“…Their dispersion leads to high diversity [11,12] in terms of personality, demographics, or educational Sustainability 2021, 13, 3491 2 of 22 background, among others. Diversity may have positive effects on team results [12][13][14][15]. Nevertheless, due to the reduced richness of the information exchange and interpersonal contact [10], diversity can also have also negative consequences [16].…”

“…Along these lines, some studies have acknowledged the importance of engagement in virtual teams' outcomes, such as the transfer of tacit knowledge, opportunities for employee development, and performance results in workers and students, among others [12,16,36,39,40]. Despite this, the literature is still scarce, and surprisingly few efforts have been made to identify ways to promote TWE in the virtual context.…”

“…However, affect is difficult to show and manage in computer-mediated communication settings [46,47], and there could be a lack of appropriate skills within this context [34]. Different strategies can be used to improve the interactions and well-being of students and workers in virtual environments, for example, management of leadership [6,8,15], ideals [2], or experiential classes and training [12,34,48]). In the context of virtual settings, training is a particularly useful way to provide skills that improve the resources-demands imbalance [34].…”