What Really Holds Global Virtual Teams Back

Cross-border virtual collaboration is the stuff of tech-utopia dreams. It carries the promise of diverse experts bringing different skills to the pursuit of a common goal, all at the click of a button—no airline tickets required.

But not all global virtual teams are set up to succeed. In fact, without proper safeguards, they can often be frustratingly unproductive and ineffectual.

Few know this better than Vas Taras, who recently taught a course on global virtual teams for Smith’s Executive MBA program. Taras, a professor of international business and department chair at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is the founder of the X-Culture Project, a 17-year-old platform that allows students from around the world (currently, 7,000 of them, representing nearly 200 universities in 70 countries) to collaborate on real-world business problems, as researchers study their behaviour. He has spent decades both studying and observing what makes dispersed teams tick, and what gets in the way of seamless collaboration.

As he tells Smith Business Insight contributor Deborah Aarts, it’s not what most people assume.

What do people tend to think of as the biggest problems that arise in global virtual teams?

There are a few issues that people usually assume are relevant: time zone differences, language differences and cultural differences. It’s not that these things don’t matter. They do. But, having done literally hundreds of experiments, I know that there are other things that matter a lot more.

Before we get into those, let’s clarify: Time zone variations don’t hamper performance? 

Not really. Time zones are a minor inconvenience. It may be a little bit challenging when you have someone from New Zealand and you’re in North America, for instance, but even in those cases, we find that it’s not as big a problem as people assume. 

Why is that?

Global virtual teams are almost always project teams. People often work on these projects when they’re most available, which doesn’t always mean during business hours. Plus, team members tend to have different chronotypes that allow them to be available at the same time. Some are owls who work best at night, some are larks who prefer early mornings. It all results in more overlap than you might think.

What about cultural differences? Do they not create friction?

Having published on this for 20 years, I can say with confidence that the correlations between cultural differences and performance are not as big as we think they are. Here’s an example: People in China are often thought to be more collectivist than people in America. But that doesn’t mean everyone in China prefers working in teams and everyone in the U.S. prefers working alone. The differences tend to be marginal enough that they aren’t such a big deal when it comes to getting work done.

You also mentioned language differences. Are things not lost in translation on dispersed teams?

Language has never been as much of an issue as people have tended to believe, and technology has evolved so much that language is even less of a challenge now. With Google Translate and AI, anyone can write in better English than Shakespeare. Translation is not a problem; there are even tools that translate voice conversations in real time. 

 So, if cultural, language and time zone differences don’t hamper the performance of global virtual teams, what does?

Our research shows that problems tend to stem from three areas. First, team members with varying levels of commitment to the work. Second, institutional differences. And third, believe it or not, is a lack of casual conversation.

 Let’s unpack each. What does the commitment level of team members have to do with virtual team performance?

Since virtual teams are generally project teams, the work involved is very rarely the sole focus of someone’s nine-to-five job. People are usually on multiple projects with multiple teams. Even the most diligent and responsible worker would have a hard time prioritizing them all equally. If the project is the top priority for some team members, and, say, the fifth priority for others, it can lead to situations where some people participate less often or with less enthusiasm than others, which can create friction.

One of the most important variables in global virtual team success is the willingness of members to show up, sit down and get things done. It can matter every bit as much as—and sometimes more than—IQ, cultural intelligence and emotional intelligence. When people don’t sit down and get things done, that’s when things start falling apart.

Those situations can look like laziness in some participants or cultural differences between teammates, but in reality it’s really a matter of the focal project holding varying degrees of importance to the individuals involved.

And what about institutional differences? How can they get in the way?  

Institutional differences come up in all sorts of ways. Think of calendar differences: My weekend might not be your weekend, my national holiday might not be your holiday. If you’re in Canada, where you celebrate Thanksgiving in October, you might be annoyed when your American teammate disappears for a week in November. 

Even among teams working for the same organization—different campuses of the same university let’s say, or different branches of the same company—there can be regional differences, different bosses, different compensation structures, even different legal requirements. The use of AI might be perfectly fine in one branch and banned by another. Compensation and incentives may be different: One teammate might be paid based on the quality of the team’s output, whereas another might have a fixed salary. These institutional differences can be very difficult to spot. Too often, people do not recognize them as such and instead attribute team problems to character flaws.

 You also listed a lack of casual conversation as a barrier to performance. What do you mean by that?

When people work in the same office, they have chances to get to know a bit more about each other: They might chat a bit over the lunch break, or in the elevator, or at the coffee station. These informal conversations matter. They help build trust. They give us better knowledge of other people. They can tell you who knows what, or who might not be the best to ask for a particular task. They involve tone and gestures, which can impart so much more information and context than typing on a screen. They encourage more serendipitous encounters.

In global virtual teams, especially those in which participants have never met in person, people do not often have opportunities to get to know one another, or even to talk about things other than the task. This creates problems, not only with team cohesion and interest in one another, but also in a sense of reciprocal obligation. 

When people feel they know each other, it’s harder to not show up for a meeting, or not do their share of the work. It creates an obligation to put in the effort, which helps to circumvent other conflicts.

Also, when we know each other well, we know what others know, and whom to go to for help. It’s easier to coordinate and share information. But when we never interact about anything other than a very narrow task, we get fewer chances to find that out.

What role can managers play in encouraging effective global virtual teams? 

The bad news is it’s not really about quick fixes. There aren’t any shortcuts that are proven to work. Small things, like going camera-on in Zoom so everyone sees one another’s faces can help, but it doesn’t solve the main problem, which is the ability of the team to sit down and get work done on the same timeline.

The good news is that improving global virtual team efficacy is within leaders’ control. Proper incentives from management to encourage effort from the team members can help resolve most of the key issues. It’s not a matter of changing the innate nature or capability of employees. It’s more about aligning incentives and priorities.