Virtual team management: what is causing communication breakdown?

The combined effects of business offshoring, of flexible work practices and of rapid improvements in technology have resulted in workplace virtual communication becoming increasingly prevalent for business meetings. However, business leaders report them to be more challenging than face-to-face ones. Most global teams are located where diverse offshored work teams are using English as a lingua franca, and despite common business complaints that they are fraught with communication breakdown, the precise causes appear to be highly complex. This paper reports on a training needs analysis carried out in a large globalized workplace for a programme entitled ‘Communicating in Virtual Teams’. Multiple sources such as surveys, interviews, document reviews and meeting observations were used to better understand the causes of virtual team communication breakdown. Whilst the analyses revealed different kinds of language and cultural misunderstandings, deeper problems of marginalization and identity confusion within global teams were also reported. This paper argues that without addressing the underlying struggles caused by offshoring, a training programme runs the risk of only addressing the surface communication problems of technology, leadership and meeting skills and even language and culture issues, which can arguably be seen as ‘masking’ deeper employee concerns and struggles.