Impact of Culture on Virtual Teams’ Performance

Since ‘virtual teams’ are not bounded by geographical dimensions, culture becomes an important determinant of their success. Though cultural diversity provides unique opportunities to build up new ideas, it can also create problems in the midst of individual interactions and eventually result in poor performance. With little research on this topic, this study examines the relationship between culture and virtual teams’ performance. An experiment was conducted followed by the survey based on subjects’ perceptions on the experiment. The results show that cultural diversity has significant impact on virtual teams’ performance through confusion and conflict in virtual teams. This study empirically proves the fact that conflict is one of the most critical antecedents of a virtual team’s performance with high R-square values in both experimental and control groups. In addition, this research introduces and empirically tests a new construct, ‘confusion’ which turns out to be also important in the virtual team’s performance research, and the relationships among confusion, conflict and the virtual team’s performance. Next, the findings confirm the importance of studying virtual teams’ performance research from the cultural perspective.