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The UWA Business School's Winthrop Professor Cristina Gibson has been named in the top one per cent of influential scholars worldwide in the field of Economics and Business.

Winthrop Professor Gibson's inclusion in the prestigious Thomson Reuters 2014 Highly Cited Researchers list recognises her work in the area of international management and cross-cultural psychology, with a focus on multicultural and geographically dispersed teams.

Over several decades, Winthrop Professor Gibson has worked with more than 30 major multinational firms, including General Electric, General Motors, Johnson & Johnson, Lockheed Martin Aerospace, Oracle, United Airlines, DaimlerChrysler, Booz-Allen & Hamilton, KPMG, Qantas, Westpac, Woodside Energy, and BHP Billiton Iron Ore. Within these companies, she has conducted research and training on team development, cross-cultural interaction, and social impact.

Her work has appeared in over sixty-five scholarly articles in the field's most prominent journals, and she has co-authored Multinational Teams:  A New Perspective (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002) and co-edited Virtual Teams That Work (Jossey-Bass, 2003).  Her research has been cited close to 10,000 times by other scholars around the world.

Winthrop Professor Gibson has received nearly five million dollars in external funding for her research from prestigious granting institutions such as the Australian Research Council, U.S. National Science Foundation, the Center for Innovation and Management Studies, Carnegie Bosch Institute for Applied International Management, and the Center for Research on Information Technology in Organizations.

Next year, Winthrop Professor Gibson will share her expertise with the UWA Business School's Master of Business Administration students, teaching a new unit called Leading Global Collaborations, which aims to prepare students to manage diverse organisational teams.

We spoke with Winthrop Professor Gibson to find out more about her work...

In terms of management and organisational structure, what do you think is the biggest challenge facing companies at the moment and into the next few years?

Managing a multicultural workforce for sustainability and quality of life. Currently in Australia, 27% of the population was born overseas and another 20% live in households with at least one overseas-born parent (ABS, 2012). And Australia is not alone in the challenge of coping with, and making the most of, multiculturalism. The US Census predicts that by 2020 the largest ethnic group in the US will be culturally mixed (US Census Bureau, 2012).

What are your top tips for working with and managing virtual teams?

1. Ensure you establish trust based on performance consistency (such as rapid responses to emails) rather than social bonds.
2. Provide training for team members in virtual teamwork (including skills such as virtual team leadership, conflict management, and meeting management).
3. Create a virtual environment of inclusiveness and involvement by maintaining both virtual and face-to-face contact with team members where possible (such as team conferences).
4. Ensure team members have an appropriate mix of technical and interpersonal skills.
5. Develop creative approaches for providing feedback, coaching and support for virtual team members. For example, you may use team-member peer reviews or identify online training and development resources.

How can virtual teams enhance an organisation?

Virtual teams often have members that represent a variety of different affiliations (that is, each person may have a different nationality, region, professional discipline, local work place, etc.). My research suggests that, rather than down-playing or forsaking these affiliations in the name of becoming "one team" instead, members should be encouraged to contribute the views and knowledge that coincide with these different affiliations, and strongly maintain them. This results in a greater pool of perspectives for the team's task and increases the reach of the network of relationships outside the team, which bring greater resources and opportunities.

I'm most proud of the research I have done which gives a voice to those who otherwise wouldn't be heard - for example, members of a minority culture who are collaborating with those from a majority culture in the workplace on a multicultural team. My findings have shown that when a broad array of needs and expectations are taken into account by managers, rather than just those of the majority culture, then workers have a higher quality of life and also contribute more to the organisation.

I have become increasingly interested in issues around identity and self-determination in organisations, as a means of being more inclusive across a broad variety of workers, including indigenous and immigrant workers. I am also very interested in corporate-community partnerships.

The Global Knowledge Manager at Alcoa Refining, James Grey, said of your work:

"As our Global Virtual Teams have developed, we realised we had large gaps in understanding how teams should operate to maximise the impact for the business and the team members. We partnered with Cristina Gibson and her team to both study our groups, but more importantly, plan detailed interventions to improve performance. Accessing Cristina's world class leading knowledge and know-how has made a step change in team performance through improved internal processes and a broader understanding of how to manage and benefit from the diversity inherent in the groups.  Her work has both improved our internal knowledge but also left systems in place that ensure the improvements are sustained."

Why do you think your work has been so well received by Alcoa Refining and broader industry?

I have always endeavoured to conduct research that addresses real problems and challenges, and I work collaboratively with the organisation in which I do the research to design it and apply it.  Broad dissemination is also important.  In addition to writing for academic audiences, I try to be creative in sharing results and implications with students and industry in many venues.

For example, in 2012, we hosted an academic-industry knowledge sharing event at the UWA Business School, which allowed us to share our research in the area of global teams, but also provided a forum for industry to discuss strategies currently in place and those in need of further development.  Among other industry representatives, the firm Schlumberger shared with the group their strategies for connecting dispersed workers. They have a number of very impressive systems and processes which are designed specifically for this purpose. I consider Schlumberger a global leader in this regard. That said, our work with Alcoa has resulted in many improvements in collaboration across sites, and their passion for learning and developing is unparalleled. They are quickly becoming a world player in the area of global teaming, and our research has helped them to accomplish this.

Media references

Cristina Gibson (UWA Business School)
Verity Chia (UWA Business School)                       (+61 8) 6488 1346