Culture, Cohesiveness and Performance in Global Virtual Teams

This paper explores how team culture affects cohesiveness in global virtual teams (GVT’s), and how team cohesiveness, in turn, affects team performance. The X-Culture project, an experiential learning exercise in international business that each semester involves around 3,000 students from six continents, provided the platform for the study. Multi-source data were used, with individual culture assessed using a self-report survey, team cohesiveness operationalized via peer evaluations, and expert-evaluated quality of team output used as a proxy for team performance. The results highlight the importance of cohesiveness on team performance and suggest that tools intended to incentivize individual performance, such as peer evaluations, should also be evaluated in relation to their impact on team cohesiveness and performance.