Cultural Diversity in Project Management

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Abstract

The number of international projects is increasing and cross-cultural project teams are common in twenty-first century organizations. Cultural diversity can be either a source of creativity or a source of problems and miscommunication; therefore, project managers should be culturally sensitive and apply flexible leadership. This research aims to explore how relevant cultural differences are in today’s project management practice and what is the perception of culture-related factors that have an impact on project success. This study uses the GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness) model as a basis for comparing cultures and data from a structured survey and nethnographic observations. Anglo-Saxon, Nordic, Confucian and Latin Europe clusters are compared and different perceptions of project success factors are found. Culture appears to have a small to moderate effect on perception of project success factors. Project leadership styles differ; still, some differences identified by cultural clusters appear to be statistically insignificant. The conceptual and practical implications of this study are related to management of cross-cultural project teams.