KEY FACTORS INFLUENCING ATTITUDE TOWARDS MULTICULTURAL TEAM WORKING

Students’ mobility, conjoint programs that are offered by two or more universities or online collaborative learning activities through the Internet are just a few examples of the increasing interest in multicultural education. Nevertheless multicultural education represents both an opportunity but also a challenge within today´s higher education. On the one hand, it has been stated that multicultural education is an essential component of quality education that can help students to gain knowledge and skills needed for successful cross-cultural interaction in a globalized world. On the other hand, cultural distance and different cultural background of students that must team work together can lead to cultural misunderstanding, frustration, and finally the failure in achieving the expected learning outcomes. To better understand the key factors that can influence attitude towards multicultural team working can help to design more successful activities increasing students’ performance and satisfaction with multicultural team working. This exploratory research focuses on analyzing gender, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and perceived playfulness on students’ attitude towards multicultural team working. To test the effect of these variables on students’ attitude towards multicultural team working a multiple regression analysis was conducted on a sample of 26 students that participated in an international multicultural team working activity. Main results suggest that perceived usefulness has the highest impact on students’ attitude towards multicultural team working, followed by perceived playfulness. Results also suggest that male students appear to be more receptive to multicultural team working compared to female students.