Using Cross Border Virtual Teams in International Business Education

1. Nature and role of cross border virtual teams in international business education

Most businesses are now international. Consequently, business education also needs to be international. However, challenges remain in the globalization of Business Schools even though the continuing effort continues to span many decades (Aggarwal 1989). International business educational pedagogies must be available and used in all areas of the business school curricula. In addition, higher education was forever altered by COVID-19 pandemic with greater use of online and other virtual educational pedagogies. The pedagogies here related to global virtual teams covers both issues.

It is crucial for international business educators to consistently develop and refine pedagogical approaches, offering students experiential learning opportunities within scenarios that closely mirror the complex and intricate environment of international business. An important skill for such students is developing cross cultural understanding and developing a global mind-set.

While students traveling abroad for cultural immersion in a well-designed program is an excellent way to develop cross cultural skills and a global mind-set, such travel is expensive in terms of student, faculty, and school resources. Consequently, its popularity is and remains limited. Thus, it is very important for international business education to explore other less expensive alternatives.

One of the notable experiential pedagogies in IB education is experiential learning projects using cross-border individuals in virtual teams otherwise known as global virtual teams (GVTs). By facilitating collaborations among participants from different countries, GVT projects offer several advantages in preparing IB students to acquire the skills required by global enterprises.

First, Global team projects typically enable students to work on business issues with students from other countries, institutional structures, markets, and cultures. In traditional classrooms, students tend to work with peers sharing similar economic, social, or cultural backgrounds. Under such a setting, students often encounter a limited range of problem-solving strategies, relevant for international business issues. In contrast, collaborating with individuals from overseas with distinctly different economic, regulatory, and social systems exposes students to richer and more diverse perspectives when approaching business challenges.

Second, global virtual team projects provide students with firsthand experience of interacting and collaborating with peers from different countries and cultures, and the resulting cross cultural exposure in a work-like setting gained through working in a GVT inherently differs from mere exposure or casual interaction with a different culture. In the context of the work project focused GVT project, students are expected not only to communicate and engage effectively but also to employ critical thinking, problem-solving, and team management skills to collaboratively tackle challenges. In so doing they learn skills valuable in an international business setting.

Third, GVT projects utilize virtual communication platforms to connect students from different countries, creating an intensified learning environment that requires students to elevate their proficiency in time management, communication skills, cultural sensitivity, adaptability, and conflict resolution. Virtual meetings are becoming especially common in international companies due to the much higher costs of international travel. Thus, with GVTs students also acquire the skills needed to engage with colleagues from various countries in virtual meetings.

Thus, considering the tremendous learning opportunities and the immersive learning experience that GVT projects can potentially offer, more and more IB programs are embracing this pedagogy. Likewise, an increasing number of IB educators are dedicated to refining best practices for effectively leveraging GVTs in IB education (e.g., Shea et al. 2011; Van Ryssen and Hayes Godar 2000).

However, the exploration of GVT in IB education is far from sufficient, and we encourage IB educators to continually refine and document best practices and seek out innovative approaches. An important aspect involves ensuring even participation and input from students of varying language and communication proficiencies. For instance, more attention is needed to investigate the learning experience of students with greater communication challenges due to language and cultural barriers. Similarly, students growing up in their home country most likely need guidance regarding the impact of the different institutional environment in another country.

Another area that IB educators can further investigate involves linking GVT projects to precise learning outcomes relevant to IB teaching, including international dimensions of communication skills, nature and sharing of international knowledge, cultural competency, team management skills, and other managerial needs. For example, what aspects of the GVT process is particularly good for a given managerial skill? Research is still needed for adopting more rigorous study designs and refined measurements of learning effectiveness. For example, utilizing within-subject experimental designs to provide direct evidence of learning effectiveness.

Lastly, it’s crucial to acknowledge that students from less developed markets are not any less involved in the global economy. However, their exposure to more advanced learning opportunities, such as study abroad and GVT projects, may be restricted due to inadequate technology and education resources. There is immense value in exploring innovative GVT formats to effectively engage students with limited access to technology or to global cultures.

Papers in this issue provide some examples of progress in the continuing scholarship in advancing the use of GVTs in teaching international business.

2. Introducing this issue

In this issue, we present three studies that examine student learning experiences in the global virtual team or online group setting.

The first article, titled “An Examination of the Impact of International Student Status on Global Virtual Teams” by Kerri Crowne of Widener University, develops and tests models examining student status, performance, creativity, and leadership, while investigating the impact of English language ability in order to inform the international business education (IBE) field. Specifically, the focus is to understand how international student status affects a student’s individual performance in GVTs. Hypotheses were generated that English language ability would moderate the relationship between international student status and creativity, as well as international student status and leadership. Results showed support, although weak, for these hypotheses. However, the most significant finding was the direct impact of English language ability on the dependent variables. Furthermore, an important contribution here is evidence that international students provide creativity and leadership on teams as long as their language ability is perceived to be good. Instructors may use these findings to design mechanisms to aid cross-cultural teams to work more effectively by providing a better understand how English language ability may influence the team and control for this ability when including peer evaluations scores in grades.

The second paper, titled “Are you happy with your experience? Determinants of satisfaction with virtual teamwork in international settings” by Michael Stoica and Thomas Hickman of Washburn University, Yong Liu of Wuhan University of Science and Technology, and Russell Smith of Washburn University, 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 square 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.

The third article, titled “It’s important to actually hear what others are telling me”: A case study of IB students’ experiences with exploratory talk ground rules in online group work” by Martha Kjølseth of Universitetet i Sorost-Norge – Campus Ringerike and Fazilat Siddiq of Universitetet i Sorost-Norge – Campus Drammen. These authors investigate how students experience and describe group work in an online course in international business (IB) after being introduced to Barnes’ exploratory talk ground rules (ETGRs), which are aligned with constructivist learning theory and which promote norms for dialog that encourage participants to think together. The value of the ETGRs for primary education students is well-established, but little research exists on how the ETGRs influence student dialog in higher education and in online classes. Therefore, this study examines the dialog in groups of fourteen IB undergraduates attending a four-week online course in International Management. Initially, the students received briefings about the ETGRs and wrote self-reports, on which we conducted a thematic analysis. Our findings show that students who engage with and apply the ETGRs describe more shared responsibility in the group work, a greater interest in exploring the perspectives of group members, and overall, more positive learning experiences. This implies that making the ETGRs transparent is considered beneficial for social interactions in group work. However, the teacher plays a key role in creating a class environment conducive for collaborative learning, and preconditions for productive group work must be met. The findings and their implications are discussed herein.

As in the past, we hope you enjoy reading this issue and that you find it thought-provoking – perhaps even giving you ideas to improve your own teaching. We would appreciate hearing your comments on this issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Raj Aggarwal

Raj Aggarwal, PhD, CFA, is Member of the Boards of the Kent State University Foundation and Ideastream Public Media, and the Sullivan Professor of International Business and Finance Emeritus and the former Business Dean at the University of Akron, USA. He is a Fellow and a former VP. and the annual meeting program chair of the Academy of International Business. Aggarwal has been a Fulbright Research Scholar to Southeast Asia and the winner of a Larosier award on the best essay on International Finance at the Prague 2000 joint meetings of the World Bank and the IMF. He has won many other awards for outstanding teaching and scholarship. Raj Aggarwal is the author of twelve books and over a hundred scholarly publications and is in the top one-third of a percent among SSRN authors ranked by downloads and has over 10,000 Google Scholar citations with a h-index of over 50, and an I-10 index of over 140. He is included in the Research.com list of the top 1% of scholars in Economics and Finance globally and in the Nature/Stanford University Global List of the Top 2% of the Worlds Scientists in terms of impact on their field.

He is or has been also a Board Member of corporations, mutual funds, and nonprofit organizations. He is a past editor of Financial Practice and Education, a Finance and Accounting area editor of the Journal of International Business Studies, and the current Editor of the Journal of Teaching in International Business

Yinglu Wu

Yinglu Wu, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Boler College of Business, John Carroll University, USA. Her recent publications include articles in Journal of Interactive Marketing, Decision Support Systems, Journal of Macromarketing, and Journal of Teaching in International Business. She is the Assistant Editor of the Journal of Teaching in International Business.