Assessing the learning experiences of business students working in cross-cultural virtual teams.

Operating in global virtual teams (GVTs) has become an established form of working for international organisations, but teaching business students how to maximise their effectiveness in GVTs is a challenge. Using a multi-country student collaboration project, called the X-Culture project, this paper investigates the learning experiences of business students working in virtual teams. The data is part of a post-project evaluation survey, which was completed by over 500 students involved in the project. Responses to an open-ended question allowing students to give their impressions on team performance were extracted from the survey results. These were then coded using NVivo into four key themes, which had emerged from the literature. The results for the first theme, teamwork and student roles, demonstrated that team leadership was an issue although informal leaders emerged to deal with the organisational issues. Responses around the second theme, communication, mainly focussed on the lack of face-to-face communication (although Skype was popular in overcoming this), infrequent communications between team members, and the shortcomings of Facebook for this work. Cultural
aspects was the third theme, with many positive responses from students about the opportunity to learn about different cultures; the final theme focussed on trust, with student feedback indicating initial lack of trust in team members, but recognising the importance of building relationships to ensure team effectiveness. Recommendations are given about the effectiveness of projects such as this in developing experiential learning.