Facilitating Information Exchange in Intercultural Virtual Teams

Though knowledge and information exchange are vital for the success of virtual intercultural teams, there is often an unarticulated assumption that it will developnaturally in the course of a collaboration. Data gathered from virtual German-Indian engineering teams indicates that variances in cultural communication routines lead toknowledge / information withholding, whether intentional or accidental, and impair team functioning. Consequently, effective facilitation is needed to create and maintainreciprocal cognitive and socio-emotional information exchange. The biggest challenge in this venture is achieving the proper synthesis between the structures needed to provide stability and the agile, open-ended VOPA approach required in a VUCA environment.To this end, some of the methods available to promote knowledge exchange are reviewed for their benefits on both fronts