MANAGING THE IMPACT OF DIFFERENCES IN NATIONAL CULTURE ON SOCIAL CAPITAL IN MULTINATIONAL IT PROJECT TEAMS – A GERMAN PERSPECTIVE

How can management handle relationship problems arising from cultural differences in multinational IT project teams? This paper uses a social capital lens to better understand the negative impact of cultural differences in IT project teams. In contrast to many previous works we do not consider cultural differences as a whole but explore the role of the different national culture dimensions. This allows for a more detailed view on cultural differences in a team context and thus contributes to a better understanding about which dimensions of national culture drive relationship problems and which management measures can help to dampen the negative effects. Based on several exploratory cases (6 multinational IT projects in 4 companies, headquartered in Germany), the authors identify three patterns showing typical problems in team social relationships which arise from differences in particular dimensions of national culture. Pattern-specific as well as general management measures, employed to address the culture-driven negative effects, are identified as well

Cultural antecedents and performance consequences of open communication and knowledge transfer in multicultural process-innovation teams

Processes in multinational corporations (MNCs) have to be configured with regard to the challenges of a permanently evolving environment. Process-innovation teams are considered to be powerful tools inside organizations to cope with this necessity. Their performance is of major importance for most MNCs. As a response to the increasing internationalization and globalization of markets, these teams show a growing culturally diverse composition. This article focuses on two major processes that are discussed to decide about a positive or a negative performance of a team: intra-team communication style and knowledge transfer. Explicitly, this article (1) tests for the influence of cultural diversity on intra-team communication and knowledge transfer, and (2) empirically examines the impact of the openness of intra-team communication and knowledge transfer on the performance of multicultural teams. A quantitative empirical survey among 84 team-members of 20 culturally diverse teams within a German sportswear company is used to test the relationships. Findings reveal that national cultural diversity has no significant impact on intra-team communication and knowledge transfer but both of them have significant influences on different measures of performance