Between-team communication in the intercultural context

Abstract

Intercultural remote team collaboration has become a key component of multinational corporation's strategic planning. By studying two engineering teams located in Canada and China, we examine the factors that affect between-team communication practice in intercultural contexts. Data, including questionnaires, interviews, team emails, and team meetings, were collected through various channels. Besides the characteristics of tasks shared by the two teams, these data also helped us to understand within-team and between-team communication practices, the factors of their communication behavior, and factors. Specifically, we administered online anonymous questionnaires for teams’ personality characteristics and intercultural sensitivity. We conducted three semi-structured interviews with each team member (total of 30 interviews were conducted): one at the beginning of the project; the second at the middle of the project and the last close to the end of the project. During the five-month project period, we collected108 between-team emails and attend three between-team meetings. Content of the emails and meeting transcripts were analyzed to examine the interactions between the two teams using Bales’ [1950. A set of categories for the analysis of small group interaction. American Sociological Review, 50(2), 257–263] interaction processing analysis. In addition to this, we also conducted an email timeline analysis to examine the immediacy of this asynchronous communication tool and identify potential breakdowns. Our results demonstrate that personality traits and intercultural sensitivity affect between-team intercultural communications. Other factors that affect the teams’ communication behavior include the communication media, the national cultural differences, distance, one team members’ awareness of the other team's workflow and workload. Based on these findings, we propose the design implications for supporting between-team communication.

Keywords:

• between-team communication
• intercultural study
• remote teamwork
• team communication practice
• awareness

Acknowledgements

We thank all the team members who participated in the project. As well, we thank Dr Jennifer Martin and Dr Olga Buchel for their assistance in the data collection and analysis processes. Part of the analysis was briefly presented at the 2014 Annual Conference of Canadian Association for Information Science, that is, 2014 CAIS/ACSI conference and LRI Symposium as an extended abstract.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Lu Xiao is an associate professor in Library & Information Science program of the Faculty of Information & Media Studies, the University of Western Ontario (London, Canada). Her main research interests are about understanding the role of different shared information in computer-mediated group activities and detecting collective intelligence in the activities. [email: [email protected]]

Dongyan Huang was a research assistant with the Faculty of Information & Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario (London, Canada). [email: [email protected]]

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Mitacs Accelerate Graduate Research Internship Program (Mitacs File: ON – IRDI).