Dear Colleagues:

Can anyone suggest good team building activities for global virtual teams?

AND do you want to be part of a study that tests their effeteness?

I lead a large student consulting project (www.X-Culture.org) that attracts about 5,000 MBA/undergraduate students every semester.

The students are put in global virtual teams of about 6, each team member from a different country.

For several months, they help real international companies solve real business challenges.

So it’s real time-zone differences, real cultural difference, real clients, and some students even get real $$ compensation and other rewards. So it’s very close to the real corporate consulting teams.

We already know that prompting students to spend some time to know each other before the project start or to have a live Skype call in the first week of the project greatly improve team dynamics and quality of the final product.

We would like now to test if team building in the first week improves team effectiveness.

We have close to a 1000 teams every semester, so we can test up to 10 different types of team building activities, assuming we want assign at least 100+ teams to each experimental condition.

We collect over 1,000 variables and measure just about anything there is to measure about the team and its members, from demographics to communication to conflicts to cultural intelligence to performance. All at multiple levels, using multiple sources, and longitudinally. So when studying the effects of team building, we can look at all kinds of outcomes, moderators, mediators, and controls.

We are looking for:

1. Team building activities suitable for virtual teams (team members never meet face to face)
2. Must be free to use and relatively easy to administer (one-time, or several activities for up to a week in total duration)
3. Preference will be given to the activities that are developed based on solid theoretical basis (theoretical explanation for why it should work)

Also very open to inviting more co-authors, as long as the person can make a valuable contribution to the study.

Thank you!

Dr. Vas Taras

Associate Professor
D&T Priddy Dean’s Notable Scholar
X-Culture Project Founder and Coordinator

Bryan School of Business and Economics
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
336-256-8611
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www.X-Culture.org
https://www.facebook.com/XCultureProject