Assessing Cross-National Research With Cross-National Teams: Trust, Quality Communication, and Cross-Cultural Sensitivity

• In Event: 28.067 - Findings and Reflections From a Cross-National, Cross-Role (Ph.D., Post-Ph.D. Researchers) Research Program: Possibilities and Challenges

Abstract

Context
Globally, expectations for research collaboration, particularly cross-national, are growing, e.g., European Union policy (Felt 2009). This can be a concern for social scientists exploring individuals’ experiences in different languages and cultures with culturally-bound methods (Redmond 2003); we cannot assume shared research team understandings. Despite this, there has been little attention to the nature and processes of such team interaction in the higher education literature.

Our team includes researchers dispersed across four countries, with varied social science expertise and research experience. While attentive to the challenges of cross-national research, we had not intentionally examined our practices. In deciding to do so, we found we lacked a conceptual framework.

Objective
• Draw on empirical evidence to create a framework for analyzing cross-national team interaction
• Apply the framework to assess a) our team interaction and b) the functionality of the framework

Conceptual framework
While higher education studies are scant, studies in organizational behaviour explore communication as a central aspect of cross-national team effectiveness. For instance, communication is influenced by frequency, quality, and content (Marlow, Lacerenza & Salas 2017). Team effectiveness is influenced by degree of virtuality in communication: reliance on virtual tools, synchronicity and information value (Mesmer-Magnus, DeChurch, Jimenez-Rodriguez, Wildman & Shuffler 2011). More information sharing seems to occur in hybrid teams than in face-to-face or virtual alone (Pinjani & Palvia 2013). The more diverse the team (nationality, culture), the greater the need for cross-cultural sensitivity. In face-to-face studies, team diversity can negatively affect information sharing (Mesmer-Magnus et al. 2011), so is likely an issue in virtual teams. Finally, trust mediates the relationship between diversity and team effectiveness by enhancing team processes, satisfaction and performance (Marlow et al 2017; Pinjani & Palvia 2013).

Mode of inquiry
We initially reasoned abductively by reflecting on our experiences, referring to project documents, published papers, team notes, and discussions. Then, drawing on the literature, we reasoned deductively applying the constructs to our experiences.

Substantive conclusions
The constructs helped us analyze our interactions in new ways. We focus here on virtuality, knowledge-sharing, and cross-cultural sensitivity. Our team was hybrid – happily, since as noted earlier, these are particularly productive for meaningful information-sharing. Further review demonstrated the value of face-to-face communication for more complex tasks, notably face-to-face meetings to develop qualitative codes and coding procedures for independently coding national data. As the literature suggests, the quality of face-to-face communication allowed us to build trust and have complex sensitive discussions about cross-cultural/-linguistic issues.

Yet, we also frequently communicate virtually about less complex tasks – through virtual synchronous discussion such as discussing inter-rater reliability, and virtual co-edited documents. The analysis has made us more intentional in analyzing the nature of the task and the degree of quality communication needed for it to be achieved, and continually monitoring cross-cultural sensitivity.

Significance
The framework we drew from the literature provided us a language to analyze how we work together, and the analysis highlighted ways to become more intentionally effective. We would encourage other teams to undertake a similar analysis.

Authors

• Lynn McAlpine, McGill University

• Kelsey Inouye, University of Oxford

• Isabelle Skakni, Lancaster University

• Anna Sala-Bubaré, Ramon Llull University

• Crista Weise, Autonomous University of Barcelona

• Solveig Cornér