And another paper got accepted, this time for the European Academy of Management in Rome. I handed in a paper with the topic “Different Jobs need Different Cultures“. It is based on the survey I made for my diploma paper and here is the abstract:

Team performance is affected by cultural values; in this paper we propose that cultural differences have different influences in distinct job-fields. The implications are based upon a survey of software development teams in the game software industry. We focus on the game software in- dustry as it represents an under-researched field, and the game software development teams are truly international work teams and are predestinated for cross-cultural research. Based upon cross-cultural information systems and teamwork literature, we develop a conceptual model with the constructs of cultural values, cultural intelligence, mindfulness, teamwork quality, and team performance and tested it on a sample of 179 game developers. The results show that cultural values have an influence on team performance and more important these values differ in the job- fields.

Especially interesting was the part about Grading, Jesse Schell mentioned a experience system for grading, used by Lee Sheldon at the Indiana University, however students get experience points for participation, homework, assignments and everything else. This led to an increase and advancement in the class.

Additional the future could be scaring, which Jesse Schell predicts, he is correct this gaming aspect could be beneficial for us, as I has to admit achievement points are motivating for me.

So got my first conference approval for the 2010 year and I will be going to the World Media Economics and Management Conference in Bogotá. This is the most important Media Management Conference so I am thrilled to present there a paper about video games and especially World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike.

Here the abstract of my paper: Current Leadership faces severe problems, since the workforce is changing and it becomes more complicated to motivate employees. Therefore this paper looks into how video games are handling the topic of leadership. Gaming is part of the modern media world and as research indicates it gives insights into leadership of future organizations. In this paper leadership theory will be compared with two cases of games: On the one hand World of Warcraft and on the other hand Counter-Strike. Both games give different insights of the intuitive game leadership training of these players. After comparing these cases with the leadership theory, we see that they are mostly fitting to the leadership theory, thus their approach to these principles is different. Therefore the cases allow us to learn diverse tactics of leadership, as the cases focus on the fun and the motivation. The players enjoy the learning of new skills and align with other peoples and different abilities. In summary this paper shows, that gamer already learning several skills for leading companies and teams, however they also learn to participate in teams on their own. Companies can learn that motivation and keep raising the bar are essential for organizations in order to attract the new gamer generation. We also learn about the importance of the fun in work, which becomes more essential for the gamers.

The biggest group is from the United States of America (35%), followed by Canada (17%) and United Kingdom (8%), All three countries are leading in video game development, with about 70 studios under the Top 100 most successful video game studios worldwide in the year 2007 (EvolvingMedia 2007). Following up is Germany (7%), Sweden (7%), France (4%) and Poland (3%). One to five participants were from: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, Romania, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, Syria and Venezuela.