The challenges of international computer-supported collaboration

This paper discusses results of a study analyzing how cultural factors affect the performance of distributed collaborative learning teams. Participants in the study included computer science students from the University of North Texas and students from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. The results indicate that a team´s cultural attributes are a significant predictor of its performance on programming projects. Cultural attributes most strongly correlated to group performance were those associated with attitudes about organizational hierarchy, organizational harmony, trade-offs between future and current needs, and beliefs about the influence individuals have on their fate. The type of programming task affected the strength of the relationship between culture and performance. These results may provide distance-learning programs a way to identify at-risk work teams.