Why Does Cultural Diversity Foster Technology-enabled Intergenerational Collaboration?

Abstract

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 today's 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.

Barriers and wellbeing-oriented enablers of intergenerational innovation in the digital age

“…2). The first cluster has 22 terms or 37,28% of the identified notions, including [words (number of occurrences)]: benefit (7), characteristic (7), conflict (9), engineer (13), evidence (9), generation (55), generational difference (17), idea (10), knowledge (12), leadership (5), member (8), older worker (49), organization ( 9) outcome (10), problem (17), process (28), resource (5), solution (7), usefulness (5), work (9), worker (7), workplace (7). The first cluster shows the dominance of identified literature on the study context regarding intergenerational collaboration (for the terms: generational differences and generation) and collaborative innovation (for the terms: leadership, member, idea, knowledge, process, organization, workplace).…”

“…Barriers also arise in this category because people are unaware that they can work with culturally different people [66,68]. Furthermore, other barriers in this dimension that can hinder IGC are a lack of social support [32,59,67] and a lack of sensitivity to technological design that interferes with the cultural background of a particular generation [13,66].…”

“…Institutional barrier dimension. The institutional dimension is defined as administrative barriers that focus on organized rules and requirements, including barriers to shared resources [13,66,78], geographical distance [78] between cooperation partners, and high market uncertainty in product markets [8,56,68] for innovation partnerships. Data protection issues [63] and differences in educational levels [46,59,63] can complicate technology-mediated intergenerational collaborative innovation.…”

“…In some cases, the collaboration between the two generations could also be challenging because there is no right time for an appointment [21,32,83]. The differences in routine patterns are unclear [13,35,78].…”

“…Although studies on the intergenerational context are still being debated [11,12], the challenges are real [1,6,7,13], notably how to shape positive interventions [14,15] for the IGC [11]. While several studies on the Information Technology (IT) domain propose the incorporation of wellbeing as the driver to better IT design and to support collaborative innovation processes [15][16][17], a profound understanding of the barriers and how wellbeing can be embedded in intergenerational collaboration (IGC) systems design continues to be lacking [7].…”