Culture Matters

Chapter 3

Characteristics and Elements of Global Virtual Teams

Introduction

Decades ago, teams relied on videoconferencing for meetings; nowadays, new collaborative communication technologies such as Trello, Skype, Google+, Zoom, and others have transformed the way people work at a distance. Moreover, the spread of social network tools like Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, and MySpace has made it much easier for teams to develop a relationship despite the lack of opportunities to meet physically. Thus, the effective management of globally distributed teams includes managing their virtual collaboration; this has become even more crucial as multinational corporations (MNCs) increase their reliance on the ability to transcend barriers of culture, distance, ...