Managerial interventions in multicultural virtual teams : A review and synthesis of the literature

Teams distributed across cultural, geographic and temporal boundaries, also known as multi- cultural virtual teams (MVTs), have been prevalent in international organizations. To provide guidance for MVT managers and support accumulation of prior experience, we establish a management model based on the extended adaptive structuration theory (EAST) and verify the model with 55 empirical studies from leading publications in related fields. The findings contribute a comprehensive set of empirically verified managerial intervention in MVTs and suggest that managers can improve MVT outcomes through manipulating five sets of struc- tural characteristics (i.e., organization, team, individual, technology and task) before and dur- ing the task process. Based on the findings, we generate a holistic view of managerial inter- vention, which explains the mechanisms of managerial intervention in MVTs.