How Urgent is Urgent? The Impact of Culturally-Based Temporal Perceptions on Virtual Teams

Abstract

In this poster, we present the results from a survey and interviews conducted on global software teams working in Ireland, the US, China and India. Our survey and semi-structured interviews investigated the effect of culturally-based time differences between non-collocated team members. An analysis of the survey data found that differences in temporal urgency, that is, the general sense a person has that time is running short and one has to hurry, significantly lowered the communication quality of teams which, in turn, negatively affected both the trust and satisfaction of the team members. The follow-up interviews corroborated these results and provided a picture of cultures with a high sense of urgency working more effectively with each other. Overall, our work suggests that although virtual team members belong to a single corporate culture, there is an overriding influence of their nation’s sense of time which affects cross-cultural interactions