Enhancing the motivational affordance of human-computer interfaces in a cross-cultural setting

Increasing globalization has created tremendous opportunities and challenges for organizations and society. Organizations attempt to draw on people’s varied experience, skills, and creativity, regardless of their location; consequently, a broad range of information technologies to better support the collaboration of diverse, and increasingly distributed, sets of participants are ever more utilized. However, research on cross-cultural computer-mediated collaboration has thus far remained sparse. To this end, this research-in-progress paper reports on a study that will examine the effectiveness of modifications of a group collaboration environment’s human–computer interface on group performance, taking into consideration the effects of national culture of the group members. We will test different levels of feedback as a mechanism to increase performance in a controlled laboratory experiment with participants from the USA and East Asia, so as to examine their differential effects across cultures differing widely on the individualism/collectivism dimension. Finally, we will discuss the implications of the findings for the design of the human–computer interface for cross-cultural computer-mediated idea generation and computer-mediated collaboration in general.