A People-centric Sensing Approach to Transforming Cross-Cultural Practices in a Global Virtual Team Setting

Cultures are nowadays perceived as critical and value resources for organizations. To be competitive in the globalized economy, business operations must leverage cultural differences and avoid conflicts and fragmentation through understanding, cultural melding, appreciation, and adaptation. This paper presents our preliminary study focusing on transforming cross-cultural practices in a virtual team setting, aimed at improving the team´s project development performance. In order to explore this innovative approach, we look into the following tasks in a stepwise manner: 1) defining a generic computational model of a virtual team; 2) identifying corresponding measures for the people-centric interactions during the operations of a virtual team; and 3) exploring methods to create transformative actions (e.g. strong virtual group components, better communication protocols and information sharing, cultural melding, leadership, etc.) to ensure operational practices in conformance with the best practices for continuous improvement on collaboration, people-centric sensing, and viability.