also encourage creativity and create conflicting viewpoints, which make it more likely that multiple options are explored and considered. Geographic Reach Multinational organizations often deploy global teams which span various national locations to serve as mechanisms for coordinating core operations across geographical and cultural boundaries. These virtual teams help to enhance knowledge sharing and integration across company locations, thereby expanding the geographic reach of firm operations at relatively low cost. Virtual teams further boost firms’ ability to identify and transfer best practices across locations, resulting in a substantial improvement to the operational efficiency of each site while preventing any one site from “re-inventing the wheel”. National Diversity Though national diversity may sometimes lead to conflicts and poor internal communication among team members due to differing ideas of a team and its operation, when managed correctly, virtual teams enable firms to take advantage of diverse and creative viewpoints. Notably, virtual teams are susceptible to intrapersonal identity conflict and struggle to develop a shared team vision due to strong identification with subgroups. Yet, these coordination problems and obstacles to effective communication may be solved by actively understanding and accepting differences in cultures. A multi-country study, based on the GLOBE culture model conducted by Gibson and Gibbs (2006), found that virtual communication environments were experienced differently by people from different cultures. The culture dimension individualism-collectivism was most strongly and very significantly related to how positively or negatively team members experienced videoconferences and telephone conferences, compared to face-to-face meetings. People from collectivistic societies showed a stronger preference for face-to-face meetings and evaluated virtual meetings more negatively compared to people from more individualistic societies. However, Haas (2006) discovered that a mix of locals and cosmopolitans was optimal for global virtual team performance. Research examining product development efforts in over 20 firms has shown that when diverse members of project teams combined their perspectives in a highly iterative way to improve integrated information flow, they were more innovative. This is echoed by Gibbs and Gibson’s 2006 study which established that a psychologically safe communication climate where members feel comfortable asking questions can help bridge national differences, reduce ingroup/outgroup bias, and resolve conflicts, as teams who communicate openly are more likely to develop a common frame of reference and shared mental model. Ultimately, the exchange of diverse perspectives and information among global team members has been found to improve team and organizational performance through the generation of