Talk title: When do good communication models fail in global virtual teams?

Speaker affiliation: Dr. Sirkka L. Jarvenpaa, The University of Texas at Austin, USA.

Talk abstract: Global virtual teams represent temporary work systems that are assembled for a joint task, performed by team members who collaborate primarily via digital technologies. Team members span geography and culture and often have only a narrow period of shared work hours. Within highly constrained temporal spaces, team members coordinate and collaborate on joint tasks with many task interdependencies, requiring constant back-and-forth workflows among members. Leveraging various synchronous and asynchronous virtual communication modes, the teams must communicate effectively to prevent prolonged misunderstandings and work delays. The virtual team environment is challenging because virtual space reduces opportunities for team members to grasp important aspects of the actual social surroundings of the members that are critical for understanding.
 
Short bio: Dr. Sirkka L. Jarvenpaa is the Bayless/Rauscher Pierce Refsnes Chair in Business Administration at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the recipient of the 2018 LEO Award, the lifetime achievement award by the Association of Information Systems (AIS) in recognition of her seminal works and global impact. She was the holder of the distinguished Marvin Bower Fellowship at Harvard Business School. She was the holder of the Finland Distinguished FidiPro Professorship at Aalto University for five years. She holds three honorary doctorates. At The University of Texas at Austin, she serves as the director of the center for Business, Technology and Law and the director of the Information Management program at the Department of Information, Risk and Operations Management. Her research focuses on inter-organizational collaboration in fast paced environments. Her work advances the behavioral approach of how people selectively reveal or manage the tensions of sharing and protection in inter-organizational interactions, and what organizational interventions are needed to support individuals in collaborations. Dr. Jarvenpaa has served as the senior editor or editor in chief for numerous journals in her field: Journal of Association for Information Systems, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Organization Science, and European Journal of Information Systems. Dr. Jarvenpaa has served in numerous leadership positions in her field.