Cultural Differences in Temporal Perceptions and its Application to Running Efficient Global Software Teams

Global software development has been found to be a difficult undertaking, in particular, when members of a single team are not co-located. Studies have looked at the impact of different cultural backgrounds, communication structures and temporal distance on the team´s effectiveness. This research proposes to examine the impact of culturally based perceptions of time. A gap analysis is proposed to carry out this examination. The gap that will be measured is the gap between time-based attitudes and behavior in team unit A and team unit B where units A and B are part of the same team but are not co-located. These time-based attitudes and behavior will be compared to measures of team satisfaction and team effectiveness. A model of the impact of the temporal cultural differences and their effect on team performance is presented and the proposed research for testing this model is described