Leading a Virtual Cross Cultural Team

Abstract

Most organizations are made up of people from different cultures. Our communication patterns, including formal and informal language used as we engage and address customers, clients, bosses and co-workers, are all predicated on our culture. Broadly, in today’s global business, where technology helps us to collaborate, the need for Virtual Cross Cultural Teams is increasing. VCCT is simply an expression that describes the work done by several people from a particular organization, but from different cultural orientations in different places and time zones using the available technological mediums to pursue effective collaboration. Today, we need to develop a completely new skill set to lead virtual cross-cultural teams to high performance. It will involve understanding the cultural dimensions so that we can generate and formally represent an evolving common culture with regards to the specific problem face. Hence, being able to lead a VCC team is even more important for today and future organization’s projects. This paper presents a clear understanding of this new phenomenon in global business, the role of culture and why it matters, the benefits and challenges of CCV teams, and finally outlines some key application points for leading a CCV team well.

Keywords: Virtual, Cross culture, Effective collaboration