Cultural Differences in Temporal Perceptions and its Application to Running Efficient Global Software Teams

Global software development has been found to be a difficult undertaking, in particular, when members of a single team are not co-located. Studies have looked at the impact of different cultural backgrounds, communication structures and temporal distance on the team's effectiveness. This research proposes to examine the impact of culturally based perceptions of time. A gap analysis is proposed to carry out this examination. The gap that will be measured is the gap between time-based attitudes and behavior in team unit A and team unit B where units A and B are part of the same team but are not co-located. These timebased attitudes and behavior will be compared to measures of team satisfaction and team effectiveness. A model of the impact of the temporal cultural differences and their effect on team performance is presented and the proposed research for testing this model is described.