Cultural Diversity, Group Interaction, Communication Convergence, and Intra-group Conflict in Global Virtual Teams: Findings from a Laboratory Experiment

In this paper we report the findings of a laboratory experiment in which global virtual teams used IBM's Lotus Same time to work on decision-making tasks. We restricted our study to short-duration virtual teams. We find that national cultural diversity adversely affects interaction among team members. We also find that interaction among team members has a curvilinear (an inverted U) relationship with intra-group conflict in these teams. Our statistical analyses reveal a curvilinear relationship between the use of polling and ranking tools of collaboration technology and intra-group conflict. The findings of the study provide motivation for future research on the use of collaboration technology support and social interaction in short duration virtual teams.