Collaborating across cultural and technological boundaries

Abstract

The increased globalization of the workplace and the availability of collaboration technologies are making CMC a necessary aspect of teamwork [27]. Culturally diverse teams are becoming the norm in knowledge-intensive projects that involve making sense of incomplete, ambiguous, and complex information (e.g., software development, new product design, customer service). The ability of teams to perform such tasks effectively is often a function of the media they use to collaborate and the culturally conditioned expectations of team members. We conducted a laboratory study to examine how different collaboration media and cultural backgrounds influence the sense-making process of culturally mixed and homogenous dyads. American, Chinese, and intercultural American-Chinese pairs of participants collaborated on two map navigation tasks using one of three technologies: video, audio, or IM. As predicted, culture and media interacted to affect the content and pattern of participants' communication.