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Top1. Introduction
While organizational structure is constantly evolving to respond to rapidly changing global markets and digital disruptions, the important role of teams in organizations continues to grow with over 60% of companies incorporating team-based structures (Deloitte, 2016). Global virtual teams are internationally distributed clusters of people who perform their professional responsibilities collaboratively across organizational borders spanning different time zones and geographic locations using different information communication technologies. They play an increasingly important role in multinational organizations (Wei et al, 2018). As these new forms of organizational structure develop to transcend functional and geographic boundaries, the effective management of knowledge in such virtual team settings becomes increasingly critical.
Considerable research has been performed on organizational-level knowledge sharing, which reflects the interchange of skills, expertise, as well as implicit and explicit knowledge between members via communication (Hogel et al., 2003). Social interaction processes among individuals can be facilitated by knowledge sharing, which serves as a critical link between the other two knowledge management processes, knowledge creation and knowledge implementation (Intezari, Taskin and Pauleen, 2017; Kao and Wu, 2021). Researchers have found that knowledge sharing fosters coordination and reduces conflicts within teams and subsequentl improves team performance (Christensen, 2007). In addition, recent research has revealed the transactive memory system (TMS), a system in which specific cognitive labor is divided among different teammates with a shared mindfulness about who possesses what domain-specific knowledge, positively influences knowledge sharing (Choi et al., 2010) and team performance (Lewis and Herndon, 2011). Accordingly, developing and nurturing a successful culture for knowledge management that supports knowledge sharing in global virtual team settings continues to rise in importance for organizations moving toward a ‘network of teams’ organizational design.
However, it is difficult to achieve effective knowledge management within global virtual teams because the different cultural backgrounds of team members make it highly challenging to coordinate these members’ inputs and activities (Horwitz and Santillan, 2012). A central element of a person’s self-identity is nationality, which is developed through a communal meaning system (Earley and Mosakowski, 2000). While some cultures emphasize harmony and group cohesion, other cultures promote independence and individual uniqueness. The individualistic cultural beliefs are likely to cause conflicts within the team, which reduces members’ group identification. This tends to hurt team viability, lowering members’ satisfaction and retention (Bell and Marentette, 2011).
The differences among global team members lead to team diversity. There are three primary types of diversity for global virtual team members: (1) surface-level diversity that is readily observable such as age and gender; (2) deep-level diversity that is not readily recognizable such as personal values, beliefs, and attitudes; and (3) functional-level diversity that reflects the degree to which teammates vary in their skill sets, knowledge, and experiences (Batarseh et al., 2017). In this research, we focus on the deep-level diversity since its influence on team performance remains ambiguous within the literature (Batarseh et al., 2017). Specifically, we focus on a salient cultural belief, individualism, because it has been found to significantly affect how individuals collaborate with one another.