Success Factors of Virtual Teams in the Conflict of Cross-Cultural Team Structures

Diplomarbeit aus dem Jahr 2010 im Fachbereich Führung und Personal - Sonstiges, Note: 1,3, FOM Essen, Hochschule für Oekonomie & Management gemeinnützige GmbH, Hochschulleitung Essen früher Fachhochschule, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Due to strong competition and to the most recent market requirements, more and more enterprises or organisations (in the following organisation only) have to rea-lign their business activities in a new way to cope with the current economic situation. Also in the respective organisational structures, specific changes have to be made to manufacture the products and to provide relevant services more effectively. Moreover, services are often provided increasingly no longer from a centralised location. For this reason, decentralised teams in various locations have developed, working together to jointly reach the targets. The services are either provided independently and on a full service basis, or such services are also provided in various parts and are then joined together or combined in other locations. So overall, organisations are facing new challenges to a growing extent. On the one hand, they have to cope with customers from different cultural areas, and on the other hand, the structure of the employees is changing simultaneously. Whether these organisations have international departments or not, the trend is now clearly towards heterogeneous team structures. Consequently, it is crucial for the organisations to be successful in spite of generally tougher market conditions. And this operational success will not come about automatically but will require well-functioning, efficient teams. As the author works in an international team with intercultural structures, there has been from the very start a particular interest in the findings and insights to be obtained in the framework of the work for this thesis.