Cultural diversity of distributed teams

Abstract

The debate on distance teams, mostly virtual teams, has been especially prominent in the academic literature for the last few years. Among the different concepts that have been studied by researchers, little attention has been paid explicitly to national culture. Although sometimes presented as a positive element of virtual teams, cultural diversity is mainly considered as a barrier to their development and management. In this study, I identify several limitations of the prior literature and note the paucity of cross-cultural theories (other than of Hofstede's dimensions). As a solution, I propose a new framework that combines contributions of both essentialist and socio-constructivist perspectives of cross-cultural theories.