A Pragmatic Discursive Culture Model for Global Teams

Abstract

Cultural aspects affect the success of organizations as well as teams enormously. There are many well known barriers and challenges, but also mitigation strategies. This paper presents a pragmatic culture model for analyzing cultural aspects to identify differences and similarities, as well as a usage process for global teams. The model combines aspects of national and regional culture as well as contextual culture and pragmatic attributes. The model improves the weaknesses of current national culture models by extending context and pragmatic factors. These factors are essential for its practical application, in particular to facilitate global teams. The model has been used and validated in different Higher Education courses between German and Indonesian students in the field of Business Information Systems. It has shown that potential barriers can be identified in advance, leading to successfully working teams in a global work environment.