Why Does Cultural Diversity Foster Technology-enabled Intergenerational Collaboration?
It addresses a gap in understanding cultural influences on intergenerational collaboration in globalized work environments, though it is incremental as it builds on prior studies of technical barriers.
This paper investigates how cultural diversity affects perceived barriers to technology-enabled intergenerational collaboration (iGOAL), finding that culturally diverse people perceive six barriers differently and consider them less of a reason to avoid such collaboration compared to non-diverse individuals.
Globalization and information technology enable people to join the movement of global citizenship and work without borders. However, different type of barriers existed that could affect collaboration in todays work environment, in which different generations are involved. Although researchers have identified several technical barriers to intergenerational collaboration (iGOAL), the influence of cultural diversity on iGOAL has rarely been studied. Therefore, using a quantitative study approach, this paper investigates the impact of differences in cultural background on perceived technical and operational barriers to iGOAL. Our study reveals six barriers to IGC that are perceived differently by culturally diverse people (CDP) and non-CDP. Furthermore, CDP can foster IGC because CDP consider the barriers to be of less of a reason to avoid working with different generations than do non-CDP.