ABSTRACT

The global teams literature has increasingly documented challenges due to demographic faultlines. While this literature tends to assume that faultlines are fixed and produce negative outcomes for teams, organizational communication scholars have long regarded team processes as dynamic and fluid. Drawing on a CCO perspective, we offer a re-conceptualization of subgroups as dynamic and discursively constructed. This study draws on an in-depth, longitudinal analysis of two global virtual teams to examine the discursive construction of subgroups and the role they play in team dynamics. Through a multi-method analysis of a corpus of 839 emails and 16 interviews with members of two global project teams over their lifecycle, we find that the discursive construction of subgroups evolves over time and plays an important role in explaining how they are experienced by team members. These findings have important theoretical and practical implications for overcoming subgroup challenges in global teams.

抽象的

全球团队的文献越来越多地记录了由于人口统计缺陷而带来的挑战。尽管这些文献倾向于认为断层线是固定的，并且会给团队带来负面的结果，但是组织传播学者长期以来一直将团队过程视为动态和灵活的。从CCO的角度出发，我们对子组进行了重新概念化，将其作为动态的和离散的构造。这项研究基于对两个全球虚拟团队的深入，纵向分析，以考察子群的话语结构及其在团队动态中的作用。通过对839封电子邮件的语料库进行多方法分析，并在两个生命周期中对两个全球项目团队的成员进行了16次访谈，我们发现，子群的话语结构随着时间的推移而发展，并在解释团队成员如何体验它们方面起着重要作用。这些发现对于克服全球团队中的亚组挑战具有重要的理论和实践意义。