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Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate how professional football clubs from the English Premier League, German Bundesliga and Spanish Primera División use digital media to expand their international reach in emerging football markets (EFM) outside of Europe. Based on the EPRG framework and Rugman’s home-region hypothesis, the aim is to broaden the perspective where “sports go global” for a further understanding of actors’ international orientation in the digital sphere.
Design/methodology/approach
The study is based on data from desk research and a qualitative survey, comprising information on international digital media activities of 58 European clubs. Cluster analysis is used to identify different international orientations with regard to digital media activities.
Findings
The data provide evidence that clubs differ strongly in their orientations towards EFM. While some global players that provide digital media content in several EFM languages and attract a large share of Facebook followers from EFM exist, other clubs focus on their home region. League-specific differences become apparent.
Originality/value
This study determines the international online orientations of European football clubs by combining two previously separated research streams in football management studies: internationalisation and digital media activities. Most clubs with a strong EFM fan base choose polycentric, multi-language digital media strategies, followed by geocentric, standardised approaches. By offering a novel angle on internationalisation in professional football, this study contributes towards optimising clubs’ international online strategies for EFM, which are markets that promise high growth rates.
The annual instructional virtual team Project X brings together professors and students from across the globe to engage in client projects. The 2020 project was challenged by the global disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper draws on a quantitative dataset from a post-project survey among 500 participating students and a qualitative narrative inquiry of personal experiences of the faculty members. The findings reveal how innovative use of a variety of collaboration and communication technologies helped students and their professors in building emotional connection and compassion to support each other in the midst of the crisis, and to accomplish the project despite connectivity disruptions. The results suggest that the role of an instructor changed to a coach and mentor, and technology was used to create a greater sense of inclusion and co-presence in student-faculty interactions. Ultimately, the paper highlights the role of technology to help the participants navigate sudden crisis affecting a global online instructional team project. The adaptive instructional teaching strategies and technologies depicted in this study offer transformative potential for future developments in higher education.
Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithmic tools that analyze and evaluate recorded meeting data may provide many new opportunities for employees, teams, and organizations. Yet, these new and emerging AI tools raise a variety of issues related to privacy, psychological safety, and control. Based on in-depth interviews with 50 American, Chinese, and German employees, this research identified five key tensions related to algorithmic analysis of recorded meetings: employee control of data versus management control of data, privacy versus transparency, reduced psychological safety versus enhanced psychological safety, learning versus evaluation, and trust in AI versus trust in people. More broadly, these tensions reflect two dimensions to inform organizational policymaking and guidelines: safety versus risk and employee control versus management control. Based on a quadrant configuration of these dimensions, we propose the following approaches to managing algorithmic applications to recording meeting data: the surveillance, benevolent control, meritocratic, and social contract approaches. We suggest the social contract approach facilitates the most robust dialog about the application of algorithmic tools to recorded meeting data, potentially leading to higher employee control and sense of safety.
Artificial Intelligence in Business Communication: The Changing Landscape of Research and Teaching
(2022)
The rapid, widespread implementation of artificial intelligence technologies in workplaces has implications for business communication. In this article, the authors describe current capabilities, challenges, and concepts related to the adoption and use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in business communication. Understanding the abilities and inabilities of AI technologies is critical to using these technologies ethically. The authors offer a proposed research agenda for researchers in business communication concerning topics of implementation, lexicography and grammar, collaboration, design, trust, bias, managerial concerns, tool assessment, and demographics. The authors conclude with some ideas regarding how to teach about AI in the business communication classroom.
This study examines the impact of perceived foreign language proficiency on hybrid culture building in multicultural teams. Hybrid culture includes a mutually shared set of norms, communication patterns, problem-solving approaches, and synergistic task coordination that result from the diverse cultural backgrounds of the team members. Language is the main vehicle for communication and plays a major role in social interaction and therefore hybrid culture building. We argue that the level of perceived language proficiency of multicultural team members influences hybrid culture building; consequently, adequate language skills lead not only to an efficient task solution but are also an important factor in creating interpersonal relationships and building a shared culture. Our empirical analysis supports the positive influence of language proficiency in hybrid teams; however, foreign language proficiency is more influential on cognitively oriented areas of multicultural teamwork than on affective ones.
Each year, the Virtual Business Professional (VBP) program brings together professors and students from across the globe to engage in client projects. The VBP program of 2020 occurred from the beginning of March through the middle of April. In this article, we share how the COVID-19 pandemic affected VBP participants and their teams. We present post-project survey results (completed by 440 of 530 participants for an 83 percent response rate), professor comments, and student comments to demonstrate how VBP participants overcame many of the pandemic disruptions to work effectively in virtual teams, develop compassion and empathy for one another, and foster more global mindsets.
Natural Language Processing, such as speech-to-text technology, is increasingly implemented in collaboration software that is used by global virtual teams (GVT). GVT collaboration has become ubiquitous and has additionally accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. The main issues of global virtual teams are technology difficulties, language and time zone differences, and lower levels of psychological safety. Advances in collaboration technology aim at improving collaboration for GVT. But we know little about the acceptance of these technologies. Therefore, the objective of this study is to explore how Millennial and Gen Z members of GVT accept speech-to-text technology; namely, automated captions in virtual conferences and automated meetings transcripts. Particularly, we are comparing antecedents of acceptance across levels of language proficiency and psychological safety. We surveyed 530 users of speech-to-text technology in GVT both before and after they used the technology. The pre-survey was administered before the COVID-19 pandemic hit; when participants completed the post-survey all were under some degree of lockdown. Results suggest that use of the technology reduces anxiety and effort, but decreases performance expectation and hedonic motivation. Non-native speakers rate the technology more positively. The impact of psychological safety is limited to self-efficacy and anxiety.
Virtual teams that use integrated communication platforms are ubiquitous in cross-border collaboration. This study explores the use of communication media and team outcomes—both social outcomes and task accomplishment—in multilingual virtual teams. Based on surveys from 96 virtual teams (with 578 team members), the research shows that the more time spent in rich communication channels, such as online conferences, increased inclusion and satisfaction, whereas the more time spent with written communication that is lower in richness increased the level of task accomplishment. Team members with lower language proficiency felt less included in all collaboration channels, whereas team members with higher language proficiency felt less satisfied with lean collaboration. In addition, limited language proficiency speakers were significantly less likely to view rich tools as helpful for their teams to reach a mutual decision. Our data support media richness theory in its original context for native and highly proficient English speakers. Our study extends the scope of the theory by applying it to the new context of team members with limited language proficiency. Management should implement a collaboration infrastructure consisting of communication platforms that integrate a variety of media to account for different tasks and different communication needs.
Virtual teams that use integrated communication technologies are ubiquitous in cross-border collaboration. This study explored media use and communication performance in multilingual virtual teams. Based on surveys from 96 virtual teams (with 578 team members), the research showed that more time spent in synchronous communication channels such as online conferences increased inclusion and satisfaction. Team members with lower language proficiency felt less included in synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, whereas team members with higher language proficiency felt less satisfied with asynchronous collaboration. Also, limited language proficiency speakers were significantly less likely to view synchronous tools as helpful for their teams to reach a mutual decision. Our data supports Media Synchronicity Theory (MST) for native and highly proficient English speakers. However, MST needs to be adjusted to account for different levels of language proficiency.
Collaboration platforms for teams, such as Slack, are increasingly used in virtual teams. Conventional wisdom suggests attitudes about adopting these types of platforms is primarily driven by their affordances. Our project emerged from the premise that psychological safety and personality traits can also significantly influence attitudes related to technology adoption. This research of roughly 300 global virtual teams showed that psychological safety influences views of collaboration platforms in terms of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and hedonic motivation. In addition, this research showed that personality traits influence views of collaboration platforms. These findings about psychological safety and personality traits suggest a team-development approach is an integral component of the technology adoption process. Recommendations for future research are provided.