Global virtual teams: Pedagogical innovation in MBA education

In the era of globalization, a number of organizations are trying to adopt distributed virtual teams in order to leverage their limited resources and overcome geographic boundaries. The rise of information and communication technologies has facilitated the creation of new approaches for coordinating work and, subsequently, for new collaborative organizational forms. Although in-depth analyses have been conducted by researchers on geographically-dispersed teamwork and cross-cultural cooperation, little has been done to address related education or training for these new and essential forms of collaboration. This research provides a framework for training students and working professionals on effective geographically-dispersed teamwork and cross-cultural collaboration in global virtual teams, based on a course taught jointly by two graduate schools in France and Japan. Key success factors of global virtual team training are assessed using categories drawn from previous literature, text-mining and co-word analyses of students' assignments, and from correlations of keyword frequencies with student culture scores.