The study of teams, which are formed when two or more individuals interact with one another as they work to reach a common goal, has generated a great deal of research over the last several decades. Classic studies of teams of workers, such as those conducted by Elton Mayo and his colleagues in the 1920s and 1930s (the “Hawthorne studies”), highlighted the idea that when people work in teams, rather than individually, significant team-level phenomena can occur. For example, in a series of experiments, Mayo and his colleagues found that when the employees they studied worked together and formed team loyalty, they experienced higher levels of motivation than when they had worked individually (Mayo, 1946; Roethlisberger and dickson, 1939). Studies such as these thus triggered a surge of interest in the topic of teams.

In recent years increased attention has been paid to multinational teams, or teams where members come from different national or cultural backgrounds (Earley and gibson, 2002). Over the last few decades the workforce has become increasingly diverse (Moghaddam, 1997) and some large organizations are now operating across greater geographic areas than in the past (McMichael, 2000). Thus, individuals cooperate in multinational teams that are increasingly diverse, and that sometimes span geographic boundaries. While there has been a steady increase in the number of studies that focus on how cultural differences may shape multinational team dynamics (Earley and gibson, 2002), relatively less is known about the role that cultural differences play when teams are also enabled by technology.