Case 1: A consortium for R&D
The first project group is a European consortium set up to make R&D in the telecommunication industry. It involves sixteen
For over twenty years, researchers have precisely shown that management practices are embedded in national cultures and that the search for a universal effective way of management is meaningless (Hofstede, 1980, Trompenaars, 1997). People embedded in a given cultural context tend to share certain worldviews (Alderfer & Smith, 1982) including specific representations of appropriate ways of cooperating, managing conflicts, accepting authority, or simply communicating (d’Iribarne, Henry, Segal,
To figure out actual practices of management of cultural diversity, we conducted a comparative study of three international project groups. The three projects have in common to gather engineers from several European countries. However, there are very different in terms of contexts, goals and structures. Each case is presented in Exhibit 1. Case 1: A consortium for R&D The first project group is a European consortium set up to make R&D in the telecommunication industry. It involves sixteen
The study evidences three kinds of cross-cultural practices implemented by transnational project managers. It is important to mention that these strategies are not exclusive. One given leader often resorts to several practices simultaneously, and within one project, leaders of cross-cultural at various levels often set up different strategies.
The strategies to cope with cross-cultural differences are themselves culture bound approaches. For example, to draw upon professional cultures to federate international teams fit the French context of interpretation within which the occupation is part and parcel of personal identity and plays a large role in the regulation of working relations. Indeed, in French corporations, relationships between employees depend on their professional status (d’Iribarne, 1989). Thus, diversity management
For instance, boundary spanning studies highlight that team leaders' facilitation of interactions across boundaries plays a major role for global virtual teams (Davis and Bryant, 2003; Joshi and Lazarova, 2005). Research on a team leader's bridge making role shows its positive effect on teams' processes, such as improving communication (Steers et al., 2010), team cohesion (Jenster and Steiler, 2011), and facilitating cultural cognitive understanding in teams (Chevrier, 2003). This stream of research highlights the importance of leaders' boundary spanning and bridge making roles for team processes and underlines that leaders appear to play a major role in employees' perception of their work (Kirkman et al., 2009).
For example, in Denmark and Sweden, Module 4 (NCP knowledge) was not included in this study because this module was considered not to appeal to their needs at the time of the survey. This is also a good illustration of the cultural dimensions within countries that need to be considered in a multinational research project.43 Although cultural differences exist, the final version of the INIS tool showed high content validity and test–retest reliability in most included countries.