Are You Happy with Your Experience? Determinants of Satisfaction with Virtual Teamwork in International Settings

ABSTRACT

The paper presents the results of an investigation into the virtual teamwork of culturally mixed teams engaged in common projects in international settings. Data was collected from students attending four different universities on four continents (Asia, Europe, North America, and South America). They worked for a semester, in virtual teams, to solve problems for real businesses in Asia and/or Latin America. Each team worked with a specific client that asked them to make recommendations and develop action plans. A model was developed to understand the way satisfaction with teamwork outcome, as dependent variable, is fostered on antecedents such as global identification, collective mind, and team cohesiveness. The analysis, exploratory as structured, was conducted using the partial least squares method provided by SmartPLS. Results show the similarities and differences in behavior for different groups of students coming from different countries and their implications for teaching teams in a multicultural virtual environment.

KEYWORDS:

• virtual teamwork
• global identity
• collective mind
• cohesiveness
• satisfaction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Stoica

Michael Stoica received his PhD at Washington State University and is currently a Professor of Marketing at Washburn University. His research interests include pedagogy, business strategy, international business, and entrepreneurship. He has published his work in numerous outlets including Journal of Product & Brand Management, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and Journal of Marketing Communicationss.

Thomas M. Hickman

Thomas M. Hickman received his PhD at Arizona State University and is currently a Professor of Marketing at Washburn University. His research interests include pedagogy, studying how social identity theory impacts behavior in managerially relevant contexts, sports marketing, and sponsorship-linked marketing, His work has been published in several outlets including, Journal of Product & Brand Management, Journal of Brand Management, Advances in Consumer Research, and The International Review of Retail, Distribution, and Consumer Research.

Liu Yong

Liu Yong is a Professor of Marketing at the School of Management at Wuhan University of Science and Technology. Her academic expertise and research interests are in strategic management, international marketing and cross-cultural communication.

Russell E. Smith

Russell E. Smith is Professor Emeritus since 2022 and previously was Associate Dean at the School of Business at Washburn University. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana. Research interests include the internationalization of business education, Brazilian economic development, and labor markets and labor relations in Latin America. As associate dean he promoted international partnerships and curriculum initiatives that build international content and cross-cultural material into the business curriculum, especially in the area of cross-cultural team building using digital tools.