Intercultural Communication and its Challenges Within the International Virtual Project Team

Abstract

With the advance of technology, face-to-face intercultural communication moves into the online virtual environment via electronic tools such as audio-video conferencing, email, messenger chat, platforms, groups, thus distances between individuals from different cultures are reduced and the exchange of information takes place within a few seconds. Cultural differences should not be a barrier to communication but an opportunity for development. International virtual project teams (IVPTs) can benefit from cultural diversity and effective intercultural communication, because it can enhance creativity and innovation within the project team, while at the same time team members are enriched by acquiring intercultural information and developing intercultural skills. So, it becomes mandatory to understand how intercultural communication takes place in a virtual environment, which are the most important challenges and how they can be overcome. This paper aims to highlight the importance of an effective intercultural communication, the role of intercultural communication skills and which are the characteristics of intercultural communicators. In order to analyze some cultural diversity aspects within IVPTs (number of project languages used, efficiency of different online collaboration tools, misunderstandings generated by cultural diversity), an empirical research was conducted, through an online survey within 107 IVPT members. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics through IBM SPSS Statistics software.