Interculturality and Virtual Teams in IT Offshoring Context: A Social Regulation Theory Perspective

摘要

This study pertains to the dynamics of interculturality in a context of offshore multicultural virtual teams offering IT services. Interculturality is conceptualized as the interaction between individuals and not just the cohabitation between various national cultures. We draw on the concepts of social regulation, which represents a process of social rule-making, and observational learning to propose a conceptual framework based on three research propositions that analyses the dynamic relationship between culture and intercultural learning accumulated via social regulation. In this context, we conjecture that interculturality in offshore virtual teams is not only expressed through electronic communication but also through the way of perception and execution of daily work tasks. In this research-in-progress paper, we use secondary data to explore the nature of the proposed framework.