The Impact of Students’ Cultural Intelligence on Their Psychological Safety in Global Virtual Project Teams

ABSTRACT

This study addresses a call for the design and implementation of course curricula that prepare students to develop their CQ and gain experience working with peers on global virtual project teams. We explored how US-based and Peru-based students’ cultural intelligence (CQ) impacted their sense of psychological safety (PS) during a month-long global, virtual team project. We also examined the students’ people-focused (PF) and task-focused (TF) behaviors as mediators of the CQ-PS relationship. The results of mediation analyses provide support for our hypothesis that the relationship between cultural intelligence and psychological safety will be mediated by people-focused behaviors. Finally, we provide a model and suggestions for virtually bringing together students from different countries to collaborate on a global virtual project, and avenues for future research. Here we encourage a focus on a curriculum that educates students about their cultural intelligence and ways to develop psychologically safe learning environments. We also highlight the potential learning for faculty teaching such courses, and note how our experience collaborating with our counterpart in Peru constituted a fractal of what our students were experiencing on their global projects.

KEYWORDS:

• Global virtual project teams
• cultural intelligence
• psychological safety
• task-focused behaviors
• people-focused behavior

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The project was modeled after projects implemented at the University of Western Australia and UC Irvine in collaboration with students at Technion in Israel (Gibson, 2018).

² We gratefully acknowledge and thank Professor Mario Eduardo Escribens Olaechea of Universidad del Pacifico in Lima, Peru.

³ Modeling the mediators in parallel allows us to compare the indirect effect of both types of team behavior without having to assume that they are independent.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rebekah Dibble

Rebekah Dibble is Associate Professor in the School of Management at the University of San Francisco. Her research interests center on the theoretical implications of boundary fluidity in teams, leadership in the context of socioeconomic diversity, the implications of global mindset for global leaders and leadership teams, and global and virtual team dynamics. Dr. Dibble's research has been published in top-tier management journals including Organization Science, Academy of Management Annals, Academy of Management Perspectives, Human Relations, and Journal of Organizational Behavior.

Linda S. Henderson

Linda S. Henderson is Professor Emerita in the School of Management at the University of San Francisco. Her research interests focus upon the communication and cultural dynamics of global virtual project teams, the communication competencies of project managers, issues and challenges for women in project management, complexity theory applied to the emergence of communities, and interpersonal communication in management theory and research.  She has published in the International Journal of Project Management, Project Management Journal, International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Emergence: Complexity and Organization, and Management Communication Quarterly.

Zachary C. Burns

Dr. Zachary C. Burns is an Assistant Professor in the School of Management at the University of San Francisco. He researches methods for and implications of measuring difficult-to-measure psychological processes such as intent perception and creative response generation. His work has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. If he is not in his office, he's probably hiking in Yosemite National Park with his wife.