VBP –Virtual Business Professional project was designed to give students real-world experience using communication and collaboration technologies employed in today’s corporate environment to collaborate with team members located around the globe. It uses intercultural workgroup communication theory (Oetzel, 2005) and focuses on communication processes that occur in a multicultural workgroup and affect the workgroup outcomes. Previous studies showed that culturally diverse groups experience significant communication problems and do not reach their performance potential (Earley & Gibson, 2002; Earley & Mosakoski, 2000; Jehn, Northcraft, & Neale, 1999; Ravlin, Thomas, & Ilsev, 2000). Students plan and hold virtual meetings, co-author and collaboratively revise documents, use project management tools, and create business documents. The project started in 2015 as a small collaboration between three schools and two countries, and in spring 2017, it included 415 students and 71 teams from 9 universities and 7 countries. The project uses the functional approach to small group communication to build intercultural communication competence (Deardorff, 2009), and teaches students to work successfully in virtual multicultural teams. The case study will provide an overview of the teaching methodology of the project and discuss how the functional approach applied to the virtual multicultural team project improves (1) team member satisfaction with the project; (2) team coordination, and (3) builds trust in multicultural teams. These measures were chosen to account for three dimensions of measuring the effectiveness of task-oriented groups, (a) task effectiveness, (b) relational effectiveness, and (c) personal effectiveness.
