Global Project Management

Communication, Collaboration and Management Across Borders

Jean Binder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781032837802
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317127352
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Global Project Management describes how to adapt your organisation and your projects to thrive in business environments which require distributed skills, around-the-clock operations and virtual team environments.

The book goes beyond simple recommendations on collaborative tools, to suggest the development of best practices on cross-cultural team management and global communication, recommend organisational changes and project structures, and propose alternatives for the implementation of the new practices and methods.

Filled with real-life examples and techniques, the book illustrates how to apply the recommendations as part of the successful management of any global project.

PART I Global Teams

This part presents strategies to manage global project stakeholders, by understanding the differences in culture, language and time zones, and identifying how to transform these differences from challenges into opportunities.

One of the main challenges of team management across the globe is that most concepts and practices are dependent on the different personalities and cultures involved. You could ask a few people around you to define the terms that compose the titles of the chapters in this part: culture, leadership, trust, conflict and coaching. You would probably find as many definitions as the number of people you interviewed. When it comes to suggestions on how to be an effective leader, build trust and manage conflicts, you will also hear different – sometimes conflicting – recommendations. You must read the chapters in this section, as well as other books in these knowledge areas, with an open mind. The recommendations, methods and practices are not the absolute truth but ‘hints’ and guidelines that will help you to develop your own way of managing people, taking into consideration what works for you, and what fits the cultures you are dealing with.

CHAPTER 1 Cross-Cultural Collaboration

‘We need a certain amount of humility and a sense of humour to discover cultures other than our own; a readiness to enter a room in the dark and stumble over unfamiliar furniture until the pain in our shins reminds us where things are.’

(Trompenaars)

There are many studies analysing and defining the challenges of cross-cultural management, most of them based on Geert Hofstede’s and Fons Trompenaars’ cultural dimensions. These two theories were built around extensive surveys of managers in different countries, working for the same multinational company (IBM, in Hofstede’s research) or in different companies (for Trompenaars’).

This chapter starts with a review of the cultural dimensions and their implications on global projects, presenting a team building exercise that will help your team members and global project managers to recognise the differences among the country cultures in a participative way. It proceeds by reviewing some general recommendations for people working on global projects, and concludes with a real-life experience, to illustrate how you can adapt your management and communication style to working across cultures.

Defining culture

This chapter focuses on country cultures, not corporate cultures. Consider these three definitions:

• ‘Culture (…) is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another. (…) The “mind” stands for the head, heart and hands – that is, for thinking, feeling, and acting, with consequences for beliefs, attitudes and skills. (…) Culture in this sense includes values: systems of values are a core element of culture.’ (Hofstede, 2001)

• ‘Our own culture is like water to a fish. It sustains us. We live and breathe through it.’ (Trompenaars, 2005)

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YOUR INTERCULTURAL EXPERIENCE

Before reading this chapter, think about a few people that work (or have worked) with you and are located in different countries. What memorable events have you experienced with these colleagues that would rarely happen with people from the same country as you?

Write on a list or mindmap the amusing and positive situations. Write on a separate list the negative conflicts you experienced, and how you would avoid these negative situations in the future.

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• ‘Culture is a fuzzy set of attitudes, beliefs, behavioural norms, and basic assumptions and values that are shared by a group of people, and that influence each member’s behaviour and his/her interpretations of the ‘meaning’ of other people’s behaviour.’ (Spencer-Oatey, 2000, cited in Dahl, 2004)

Project managers must understand human nature and personalities in order to select team members, assign correct roles and responsibilities and perform stakeholder analysis. In addition to this, global project managers need to recognise how the different attitudes, beliefs, behavioural norms and basic assumptions and values can influence the collaboration among team members coming from multiple countries, and learn how to adapt their leadership style to the different cultures involved in the project.

Culture and project management

Culture is often represented as icebergs or onions, representing its visible and invisible aspects. According to Hofstede (2001), the visible components – also called practices – are manifested by symbols (words, gestures, pictures and objects), heroes (real or imaginary persons serving as good models of behaviour) and rituals (collective activities without a practical purpose but essential to keep the individual bound within the norms of the collectivity). You can observe all these manifestations when you visit other countries and when you receive foreign visitors. However, only insiders to those cultures can easily capture their real meaning. When managing projects abroad you must make an effort to:

• Discover the meanings of different symbols used by local people, in order to respect and follow their basic instructions. In project management, the symbols can translate into the specialised terms, techniques and diagrams;

• Know their local heroes, to understand the role models of behaviour. The organisational heroes can be the people who advance quickly in their career, employees receiving management awards or popular team members;

• Understand and respect the rituals, which in business are often present in the way people organise or attend meetings, in local practices for celebrating success, negotiation processes and by the demonstration of power when attending or rejecting meeting invitations.

Hofstede (2001) suggested that the ‘invisible’ core of culture is formed by the values, which broadly represent tendencies and preferences over different aspects of social or professional life. These are some examples of values that may affect global projects, as they differ depending on the geographical location of team members:

• Is it polite to decline meetings because they occur during your lunch hour? Conversely, is it acceptable to book regular meetings during the lunch hour? Is it acceptable to organise a meeting starting at 6pm on a summer Friday afternoon?

• Is it acceptable to request your project team to cancel their summer holidays to finish a late deliverable?

• Are project managers more effective when they use their formal power (their hierarchical position) or their expert power (based on their competences)?

• What is the preferred leadership style for project managers, in each part of the project life cycle?

• How important is the performance of the team members, when compared to the way they respect and relate to their colleagues?

The cultural dimensions defined by Hofstede

It is very important to understand what types of differences you can come across when working on global projects. The existing cultural studies identify and measure the relation of cultural aspects among various cultures, classifying them under distinct dimensions. The following classification summarises the dimensions defined by Hofstede (2001)¹:

POWER DISTANCE

This dimension reflects how individuals from different cultures handle the fact that people are unequal, and how the project stakeholders are likely to be involved in the decision-making process. As an example, some team members coming from countries with larger power distance rates may find it more difficult to disagree with their project managers in front of other people than individuals from countries with smaller power distance rates. In order to understand if this general rule is applicable to your project team members, you can organise some one-to-one sessions with different individuals to validate their thoughts and compare them with the opinions they give (or not) during team meetings. You can then reduce this power barrier by organising ‘round-table’ discussions, asking all team members to give their opinions on key project decisions. When some of them give short affirmative or neutral answers, you can stimulate their thinking by raising questions that allow them to voice their opinions without a feeling of agreement or disagreement. One example, ‘Have you seen a similar event in a previous project? How was it handled? Do you think we could have the same approach in this project?’.

Table 1.1 shows that power-distances are greatest in Malaysia, and smallest in Austria. All countries in between are ranked on a continuum for comparison purposes.

Table 1.1 Countries (regions) and their power distance relative ranks

INDIVIDUALISM AND COLLECTIVISM

This dimension classifies countries according to the relationship between individuals and societies, the extent of group cohesiveness, the importance of participating in a social group and the values attached to the working conditions and ambitions. Generally, team members with individualist mindset praise self-determination, are fond of having sufficient time for their personal lives, enjoy freedom on selecting the way they will execute the tasks assigned to them and thrive on challenging activities and competitive environments. Work tends to be performed better when the project objectives coincide with the team member’s personal interests. The business aspect of the relationship between the workers and the project organisation is often prominent.

By contrast, the collective will of a group or organisation can determine the behaviour of team members from collectivist cultures, who are likely to give more importance to improving their skills, using their abilities and having good physical working conditions. A higher degree of achievement occurs when the project objective and strategies coincide with the interests of the groups represented by these stakeholders, who will probably see their relationship with the project manager on moral terms.

Table 1.2 shows the increasing ranks, from the United States (highly individualist) to Guatemala (highly collectivist).

Table 1.2 Countries (regions) and their individualism relative ranks

MASCULINITY AND FEMININITY

Using Hofstede’s terminology, in the more masculine countries the degree of gender differentiation is high. Individuals tend to associate men with control, power and material ambition, and women with modesty, tenderness and focus on quality of life. The ideals are economic growth, progress, material success and performance. In the more feminine societies, the level of discrimination and the differentiation between genders tends to be low. Individuals are likely to treat men and women equally, and value the quality of life, human contact and caring for others.

Female project managers from feminine countries may need to be patient and assertive to overcome perceptions of the stakeholders from masculine countries. Male project managers from masculine countries must show modesty, humility and competency to win the confidence of team members located in feminine countries. Global project managers may need to encourage and support female team members from masculine countries to contribute and actively express their viewpoint.

Table 1.3 provides the decreasing rank of masculinity, from Japan (most masculine) to Sweden (most feminine).

Table 1.3 Countries (regions) and their masculinity relative ranks

UNCERTAINTY AVOIDANCE

This dimension reflects the resistance to change and the attitude to taking risks of individuals from different countries. As most projects are elements of change and involve risks, the stakeholder analysis and management activities can certainly be more complete and effective when the national differences are taken into account (see Chapter 6).

Individuals from countries with stronger uncertainty avoidance indexes are more inclined to avoid risks, enjoy working with tight rules and control systems and resist innovation. Team members are likely to enjoy tasks requiring precision, punctuality and hard work and feel more comfortable with detailed planning and more short-term feedback. Stakeholders from weaker uncertainty avoidance indexes enjoy innovation, accept higher risk levels and are comfortable with open-ended learning situations. The team members tend to resist stress better and accept work packages with lower levels of definition.

Having a good mix of people from different countries in the project team allows the organisation of a brainstorming exercise to identify how to win over the resistance and obtain buy-in from different types of stakeholders. The understanding that team members may have different tolerance levels for ambiguity or uncertainty will help you to determine the level of details required for the rules, conventions and standards in your project (see Chapter 7), as well as the level of definition of the work packages that will be assigned to team members from different cultures.

Table 1.4 lists the countries according to their uncertainty-avoidance rates, from the weakest (Si...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Frontmatter Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Global Teams
• Part II Global Communication
• Part III Global Organisations
• Part IV Implementation of Collaborative Tools
• Part V Adoption of Collaborative Tools
• Part VI Implementing the Global Project Management Framework©
• Coda
• List of Accronyms and Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Index