Project management is one of the most important tasks within an organization. Most of the companies in today’s world have come up with different agile and flexible project management techniques that the managers are advised to follow for the overall benefit of the project. Efficient project management can not only turn the project into a success but at the same time also ensure that the employees and the other team members who worked in the project are also happy and satisfied being a part of the team and the project.
Therefore, it is of utmost importance for the project managers that they handle the team they are leading, effectively and ensure to get the most out of their capabilities for the successful completion of the project (Meeussen, Otten and Phalet 2014). This study will highlight the different aspects of a multicultural project management environment such as the behavior of the team members, the cultural differences, recommendations and alternatives for future implementations to overcome such issues and unforeseen situations.
Cultural diversity in project management:
Cultural diversity exists in most of the organizations, which have different data centers and zonal offices in different parts of the world. These branch offices often employ new people from the host country where the branch is set up, or they also transfer their existing employees form the native or the home country of the company itself. When there are employees’ from different cultural backgrounds working together in the same team for any project, it is the responsibility of the project manager to ensure that there are no communication gaps and difference in
opinions within themselves and they all work for a common goal for the overall advantage of the project (Tenzer, Pudelko and Harzing 2014). The manager should ensure that the team members take up necessary training for the new policies and ethics aligned to the culture of the host office before beginning to work in the team with the other employees. He should ensure that the team members are well educated about the culture there and there should be no language barriers within the team, thereby eliminating any kind of communication gap.
Communication gap with respect to culture:
How do project managers effectively manage communications in multicultural project teams?
Communication can be verbal as well as nonverbal that the project managers should take into consideration. For instance, when he tries to communicate with his team members form the different cultural backgrounds he can either talk to them in a mutual language known and understood by both or he can choose to communicate by pictorial descriptions, hand movement etc. Again that is a time consuming way of communication and sign languages at times can hurt team members sentimental.
For example, Indians and some other Asians feel rather comfortable with silence especially with information that is confidential. They tend to appreciate someone who thinks carefully before answering a question Information. They particularly admire someone who gives careful thought before answering questions or making a point whereas Americans consider silence to be breakdown in the communication since they tend to talk ore to share their opinions and feelings. On the contrary, the Americans consider the British way of conversation secretive (Mehrabian 2017).
Gestures such as finger pointing as well as waving are often considered as an insult in many countries. The project managers should always take such considerations. In many Asian Countries, such as India, employees may often lower their eyes or move them away from their managers in order to show respect whereas in other countries such as Australia or United States the employees maintain eye contact with their managers to do the same (Blume and Board 2013). Lowering eyes in such countries can mean demotivation, shyness or dishonesty.
Manager should be aware of cultural differences, and help the entire team in fostering cultural acquisition that is also acceptable by the organization. Language barriers should also be overcome by providing proper language training to the employees and it must be noted by the managers that the same words are not pronounced in the same way by people from different cultural backgrounds and therefore should not be misunderstood or misinterpreted (Tenzer and Pudelko 2013).
Concepts and processes:
Cultural diversity in project management is one of the biggest challenges, which are faced by the organizations as well as the project managers. The PMBOK guide rightly states that in an efficient project management the crucial stages that ensure the successful project completion are ensuring timely as well as appropriate generation, collection and storage, dissemination and finally the ultimate disposition of important project information. It creates the crucial link among team members, ideas as well as information are shared in the team. All members should communicate in the “project language” which is commonly understood by all member of the team (Hogrefe et al. 2013).
Misinterpretation and rumors in communications often create cultural gaps. Some of the questions a project manager should ask himself before beginning to take over and manage the project are:
Project managers should opt a number of strategic techniques to approach the issues faced by the members of a multicultural team. They should be able to address the issues of the team they are leading. Some of the techniques are discussed below:
Proper coaching:
The managers should be able to bring together the ideas of the different team members coming from different cultural backgrounds, and then drive the entire team ability to a common goal and the successful completion of the project. He should be able to accordingly train the team members, and keep motivating them for the same (Kerzner and Kerzner 2017).
Effective communication:
Effective communications should be done at all points of time during the life cycle of the project and newsletters, emails and other forms of communications such as team meets should all be done in one common “project language” understood by all (Müller 2013).
Different team members for different cultural backgrounds may have cultural conflicts within the team as well as different ideas, which might be harmful for the overall success of the project. Therefore, the manager should be capable to handle such situations and critically analyze an unforeseen problem situation in the lifecycle of the project and solve the issues accordingly with support from his team members irrespective of their culture (Knapp, Hall and Horgan 2013)
Virtual project teams consist of members from different geographical locations. It influences in personal conflicts, misunderstanding among themselves as well as very little trust. Intercultural diversity is also used to set goals and effectiveness of the team. Delayed feedback is an issue of cross-cultural teams in a computer aided communication misunderstanding since it reduces the employee social interaction levels. For the cross-cultural project management to be successful, the teams need to reach a more mature global team model as shown below in the diagram:
Figure: Relation evolution model in global virtual teams (Müller 2013).Recommendations/advice:
Based on the different issues faced in cross cultural project management, there are a number of recommendation that the project managers can follow. They should always spend more time in trying to understand the culture of individual team members. This will help him to promote betterment and harmony within the team members. The project managers should incorporate more training programs within the team in order to equip the members with a better understanding of the project and overcoming cross-cultural barriers.
Managers should also look forward to decide on the cost factors and implementation strategies of the business models and latest technologies by taking into consideration the sentiments of the people of the host country (Ozguler 2016). The ethical, social considerations as well as the legal aspects of carrying out the project should also be taken into consideration jut not by the project managers but the organization as a whole.
Conclusion:
Therefore, it can be concluded from the above study that multicultural team management in a project is an extremely difficult task for the managers and must be considered by all the organizations. There are different aspects such as language barriers in the communication among the tea members, pricing issues, which again varies from country to country, sentimental beliefs etc. Most importantly, the managers should be able to understand the basic needs and culture of all the team members and the gap in ideas and implementation of those ideas should be bridged by the managers by effective communication, training programs as .
well as aesthetic initiatives such as team outings and recreational programs. This not only helps in bring the employees closer to each other but also gives an overall advantage to the success of the project. If the managers can successfully incorporate these measures, the project management becomes much easier even in a cross-cultural work environment and helps in overall improvement of the project manager.
References:
Blume, A. and Board, O., 2013. Language barriers. Econometrica, 81(2), pp.781-812.
Burke, R., 2013. Project management: planning and control techniques. New Jersey, USA.
Hogrefe, K., Ziegler, W., Wiesmayer, S., Weidinger, N. and Goldenberg, G., 2013. The actual and potential use of gestures for communication in aphasia. Aphasiology, 27(9), pp.1070-1089.
Kerzner, H. and Kerzner, H.R., 2017. Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.
Knapp, M.L., Hall, J.A. and Horgan, T.G., 2013. Nonverbal communication in human interaction. Cengage Learning.
Meeussen, L., Otten, S. and Phalet, K., 2014. Managing diversity: How leaders’ multiculturalism and colorblindness affect work group functioning. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 17(5), pp.629-644.
Mehrabian, A., 2017. Nonverbal communication. Routledge.
Müller, C. ed., 2013. Body-Language-Communication (pp. 310-319). de Gruyter.
Ozguler, I.S., 2016. Increase the projects’ success rate through developing multi-cultural project management process. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 226, pp.236-242.
Rodrigues, I. and Sbragia, R., 2013. The cultural challenges of managing global project teams: a study of brazilian multinationals. Journal of technology management & innovation, 8, pp.4-4.
Tenzer, H. and Pudelko, M., 2013. Leading across language barriers: Strategies to mitigate negative language-induced emotions in MNCs. In Academy of Management Proceedings(Vol. 2013, No. 1, p. 12852). Briarcliff Manor, NY 10510: Academy of Management.
Tenzer, H., Pudelko, M. and Harzing, A.W., 2014. The impact of language barriers on trust formation in multinational teams. Journal of International Business Studies, 45(5), pp.508-535.
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