Juxtaposing transduction and transtraction: Pugging in international virtual teams

Abstract

Despite the recent surge in digitization, organizations still struggle with utilizing international virtual teams. Such teams still tend to follow the concept of top-down planning and are, therefore, controlled by some sort of headquarter. In the context of multiplayer games, however, we observe a more self-organized way of establishing teams, which is commonly referred to as pugging: Teams emerge, establish a shared goal, and disband afterwards. They follow the concept of bottom-up autonomy. Pugging is highly beneficial to the gaming world, which is why we will follow the cultural transduction framework to transfer this team concept from gaming to the corporate context. Since the corporate context and gaming are strongly intertwined and influence one another to a great extent, we will expand this framework with the concept of transtraction.