Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/56805
From Monocultural St. Petersburg, Russia BY TATIANA ANDREEVA Three years ago, I wanted to design a project that would provide stu- dents in my cross-cultural course with much more exposure to other cultures. At the time, the cohort I was teaching was very monocul- tural—I had one or two interna- tional students, but the rest were Russians. They had traveled, but none had spent a semester abroad. I didn't have the luxury of send- ing them on multiple international study trips, but I did have relation- ships with colleagues at member schools of the Global Alliance in Management Education (CEMS), an international alliance of aca- demic and corporate institutions. Through that network, I have To Multicultural Virtual Team Challenge St. Petersburg University Graduate School of Management (GSOM SPbU) partnered with several professors to design virtual team challenges, which require students at different schools to collaborate on a course project together, all through the use of technology. So far, these chal- lenges have teamed our students with their counterparts at schools such as Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi in Italy, the Rot- terdam School of Management at Erasmus University in The Neth- erlands, ESADE Business School in Spain, the London School of Economics and Political Science in the United Kingdom, and Corvinus University of Budapest. Three years later, virtual team projects are a standard part of several of my classes, including courses in culture, organizational behavior, and knowledge manage- ment. Each virtual team challenge includes collaborative research, a visual presentation and team report, a debriefing session at the end of the project, and individual papers in which students reflect on their experiences. Students receive two grades: a group grade for the project and an individual grade for their individual papers. Students are assigned into teams, with members dispersed among sev- eral schools. We try to form teams with equal membership in each country, but that isn't always pos- sible. Last semester, for example, I had 70 students in my class, my col- league in Italy had 80 students, and my colleague in Budapest had 17. In that case, teams each had three or four students from Russia and Italy, respectively, but only one student from Budapest. But when a team is culturally imbalanced, it can provide a learn- ing opportunity that we address during the debriefing. In our proj- ect with Corvinus, we asked the individual students from Budapest how it felt to be in the minority. We talked about how subgroups form and how team dynamics evolve as a result. This sparked discussion about how virtual teams can be more inclusive of all their members. Creative Collaboration I have experi- mented with dif- ferent formats for the virtual team 30 March/April 2012 BizEd