Developing a Hyper-Personal Team Building Curriculum for Multicultural Remote Working: Theorization and Tentative Application in Progress

The thrifty growth of international corporations and other transnational organizations stands out as a profound angle of globalization, which has deeply engaged current scholars and organization managers across cultures in the discourse of multicultural management. Meanwhile, the notion of remote working, which draws on access to the Internet and computer technologies, especially prevailing during the COVID-19 pandemic period in response to the long-lasting shutdown of physical workplaces, continues to provide rich topics for computer-mediated communication (CMC) research. Combining the multicultural context and the CMC framework, this study proposes to apply the hyper-personal model to multicultural teamwork of virtual group, as a potential solution for culture-based intragroup conflicts, and, moreover, reflects upon some aspects of the classic Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, originally based on traditional, face-to-face workplaces. The CMC-based re-examination of Hofstede’s theory could constitute a major theoretical contribution of this paper. After reapproaching Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, we take one step further from theorization to tentatively developing a hyper-personal team building curriculum, in hopes of exemplifying and navigating the instructional design of team building programs that aim for harmonious and productive multicultural teamwork in remote working.