Calliope: supporting high-level documentation of open-source projects
MIS '05 Proceedings of the 2005 symposia on Metainformatics
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Cultural Diversity in the U.S. workforce is increasing, in addition, organizations are requiring greater worker involvement and teamwork. While cultural diversity provides unique opportunities to stimulate the work environment, it can also create problems in individual interaction that often hinders group performance. Therefore, it is imperative to determine how multicultural team performance is similar and different from culturally homogeneous team performance. In the Information Age a number of organizations are using technology such as Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) to promote participation and improve team interaction. This article provides the results of a pilot study where survey responses were collected from two categories of teams, multicultural teams and culturally homogeneous teams. Participants were surveyed on their preferences for team decision making, in reaction to team exercises, within a GDSS environment and within a traditional, non-GDSS environment. An analysis of the responses showed that a significantly higher percent of multicultural team members, in comparison to culturally homogeneous team members, responded more favorably for using a GDSS in certain aspects of team decision making. For example, multicultural team members to a greater extent preferred the computer environment for "discussion of issues" and "expressing ideas." Implications for using GDSS technology for team building within multicultural organizations are discussed.