Nineteenth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

In multinational organizations, multicultural teams operating in globally dispersed online environment has become prevalent. Factors such as advanced Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), globalization of markets and global sourcing has led multinational corporations to adopt project management globally. With the potential size and complexity of a Global Project Team (GPT), it can be assumed that numerous interactions and communications take place among team members that require teamwork. When some form of teamwork takes place in a GPT, sharing of tacit or explicit knowledge occurs among team members, by interacting around a common goal. This teamwork is comprised of some shared cognition, which may lead to cognitive convergence. This cognitive convergence is indispensable for increased team performance and effective communication. Teamwork in global project environment has been studied in various literature, however, little attention seems to have been paid to the difference in the cognition mechanism of the team members in a GPT, even though the relationship between cognition and teamwork in general has been thoroughly investigated in the areas such as team cognition and mental model. Given the above situation, the presentation reviews the literature for conducting the above-titled research, consisting of three parts: a discussion on the definition of GPT, the six concepts that are associated with focus and periphery of cognition, and the research methods used in the major literature, to investigate how the difference of the cognition mechanism among team members can affect the performance of a GPT and provide guidance for better performance.