Enhancing Global Virtual Team Performance Through Language and Cultural Intelligence (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hi, my name is Robert Stephens, I'm from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania.

Speaker 2: I am Longzhu from University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire.

Speaker 3: I am Annamaria Swatch from the University of Nino. So welcome to our presentation, our title is leveraging language proficiency through cultural intelligence to improve global virtual team performance. So our paper focuses on the performance of global virtual teams. Global virtual teams are diverse, multicultural, they have a lot of challenges, and there is a rich body of literature about this. Our paper looks at three sets of variables, and we look at these topics at the team level, not at the individual level as much studies about this, many studies about this do.

Speaker 1: Thanks, Anna. The study was conducted with 895 global virtual teams from the X-Culture project in 2018, these are student teams. We looked at team cultural intelligence and team English proficiency as the team skills we were measuring. Team processes included the elaboration of task-relevant information and task conflict, and our outcome variables were team creativity and team performance. These student teams were working on real-world business projects, market entry mode plans for real companies. So our hypotheses are that there will be a mediating effect going from team English proficiency through the elaboration of task-relevant information, resulting in higher team creativity and better team performance. We also hypothesized that there will be a moderated mediation with team cultural intelligence so that teams that have higher cultural intelligence will be able to leverage their English skills even further and that these relationships will be even stronger. We also hypothesized then that task conflict will actually have a negative impact on creativity and performance, but that team English proficiency can reduce task conflict, therefore, with lower conflict, we would see higher creativity and performance. Again, a moderated mediation is hypothesized in which cultural intelligence can moderate the relationship between English proficiency and task conflict, further reducing conflict and making that relationship less damaging, making conflict less impactful. So we did find support, significant support, for the mediating effects on the elaboration of task-relevant information into creativity and performance, and we also found positive relationships with the cultural intelligence as a moderated mediation. However, we did not find significance in the conflict variables. Just to illustrate the moderated mediation slightly further, you can see that with high cultural intelligence, teams had a much stronger, the relationship between English proficiency and task-relevant information was much stronger for teams with high CQ, and this was both on the relevant, task-relevant information and on conflict as well, I'm sorry, on creativity and on performance in the team.

Speaker 2: Thank you, Bob. Our contribution can be very, very summarized using this quote from Elisa Abbott, which goes like this, language is culture and culture is language. In order to better understand one, we must understand the other. So we suggest that management should be sensitive to both language and cultural ability, and our study shows that the positive effect of language proficiency on team performance and creativity can be even stronger if a team has also a high level of cross-cultural ability. Therefore we also suggest that management should highlight the value of cross-cultural trainings, especially for the Global 2 team, which there is a high level of cultural diversity and linguistic diversity, and the task is complex. Thank you very much.

Speaker 3: Thank you. Thank you.