The Effect Of National Culture On Project Management

By Author: Henry Ford
Total Articles: 189
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The current global growth of business has been on the increase with projects being managed both nationally and internationally. This condition has called for great attention on research into the significance of national culture on management of the awarded projects. The national cultures originate from various backgrounds of social cultures but the surprise is that no uniformity and understanding between multi national cultures and values. For many years, it has been neglected especially in construction industry which only focuses on practical outputs rather than the group interests and values in achieving the best results. Even though the contracted organization, company or industry has their set conditions which consider better communication, collaboration and work effectiveness, the accumulated effects of the national groups’ cultural practices, beliefs, know-how, behavior and attitude may either positively or negatively affect the process of management for better results.

This report will therefore identify and critically analyze how existences of various national cultures influence the decision making process ...
... and outputs in project management.
The cultural perspective of management is very important since it forms the base for enforcing the various management theories (Morgan 1990). This means that the various recognized national cultures would dictate the procedures, structure and content of management decisions. This can be noticed in Singapore and Hong Kong as having different management approaches due to different national cultures.

Management team should intensively consider that various professionals in their team have different cultures adopted from their countries of origin or communities (Phillips 1994). This implies that success in project processes can only be realized if issues arising are treated in amore uniform, ethical and reasonable manner depending on the foundation knowledge of the existing national culture (Rowlison et al. 1993).

In Australia, there is national culture which gives high tariff protection which has really been the main support for her industries. So this culture would really restrict and control the decisions by management which would have limited freedom to make decisions which may affect the industry negatively. In the long run it can be seen that the
Considering how other people see things in project management would yield clever negotiations practice by the management. However if the management can just stick to the way management should handle an issue without taking in to account that peoples national culture is not in terms with his approach, then misunderstanding would automatically arise hence thwarting the pace and cohesion in delivering the assigned project (Trompenaars 1993).

Project managers tend to make decisions based on no theories such as systems and contingency theories which consider the national environment culture as a factor for consideration. Newcombe et al. (1990) there is little attention which has been given to culture as a component of environment thus leading to bias decisions. However some national cultures when considered in management may bring stress and strains in decision making by the management. For instance, having national culture on the official attire for all national workers may stress the management process. For instance, the attires in construction projects need professionals, all the time, to wear protective clothing which may not conform to the national requirements.

In some scenarios, management may be forced to learn and understand how the national cultures view relationships during work process (The Chinese Culture Connection 1987). This would help project managers have a standard understanding of norms, rules, practices and procedures. This would set employees free since they would see their values in relationships well considered by the management when making decisions. Similarly, this approach of national relationship culture would provide managers with ways of managing the strains and tensions resulting from the fact that the nationals have different levels of culture, which may be hard to bring on uniform platform for consideration (Van den 1992).
In addition, national culture with common norms and practices greatly helps in management of the realized product through collaborations between parties which are technically and economically dissimilar (Peters 1992). In this context it would be easy for management to make communal assumptions and purpose. In some cases, the management may be faced with making decisions on radical changes to achieve the project effectiveness. In this case, national culture would prove quite useful by adopting the normative national dimensions of incorporation. For instance, if the interests of professionals are quite elaborate with complex project processes, the management must see on how to solve these two issues in a manner that maintains project’s effectiveness; thus the adoption of normative approach as accommodated in the national culture (NEDO 1991).

Change in national culture, is as an inevitable thing just like in economy and technology, would also change the way management make decisions. However some changes amidst the project process may bring negative effects thus making decisions hard to make by management body and this may force managers to adapt and absorb the effects (Morgan 1990). This implies that the accommodative national culture of the project industry would be the way forward in the acceptance of change related uncertainty. On the other hand, National construction culture normally causes a lot of shifts in which managers make decisions due to varying requirements of various phases. For instances, during design process, managers need to allow more room for dialog and modifications, construction phase decisions become structured and finally on pouring the mortar, the management must be strict and apply some bit of dictatorship(NEDO 1991).

(Van den 1992) the national culture on a single language being recognized has also hampered effective management in projects. Looking this from an international company carrying out a construction work, there would be communication break down between the management team and the other national professional thus poor relationship. For example if a construction company from a different country with one spoken official language is the norm carries out a project work in another country with different national language culture, management would have very hectic task in decision-making since there is no way they can interact with other professionals in order to best understand their values, attitudes, behaviors and interests towards such projects (Hofstede 1984). This national culture effect would, in most cases, result in chaos and misunderstanding in managerial team resulting from erroneous interpretations of words and signs used. This would therefore force project managers to study and re-evaluate human organization as can be seen in Hong Kong which enforced English speaking law and exposed her construction professionals to the western concepts as well as educate them on English since it was is in multiple of continents.
In addition, most states adopts the power distance national culture which recognizes the bosses as superior to the subordinates (Hofstede 1984). This would mean that those in senior managerial positions may not have much time for those working under them (Van den 1992). However, when it reaches a point where mangers need to make some collective decisions, they would be needed. This would cause disarray and reduced mutual aid amongst the management team since the lower management team might see it from the angle of existing inequality and disequilibrium thus lowering the project management effectiveness (Hofstede 1984).

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