No sense of distance: improving cross-cultural communication with context-linked software tools

Many studies have established the difficulties inherent in both cross-cultural and distance communication. Distance work interferes with close collaboration and trust. Physical distance and lack of time zone overlap can exacerbate cross-cultural misunderstandings. Nevertheless, international collaboration over distance is becoming increasingly common in many fields. Scientific collaborations, in particular, are becoming larger and more international in scope. There has been much research in the area of understanding cultural differences, but not as much in how technology might bridge such communication gaps in international scientific collaboration. In an effort to begin to form guidelines for such technology development, we undertook an empirical study of how computer-mediated communication tools facilitated cross-cultural communication over distance and led to greater team effectiveness in an international astrophysics collaboration.