Cross-Cultural Management In R&D Project: Case Analysis

With the globalization of economy, vast numbers of projects rely more and more on cross-national cooperation. People with different nationalities, different cultural backgrounds are involved in a same project. Accordingly, the cultural conflict caused by cultural diversity impacts the project to be executed smoothly. Cultural conflict gives the corresponding project management new requirements. How project managers could react to these challenges becomes an urgent issue to be solved.In this thesis, firstly, it introduces and analyzes the general concept of culture; derivates by Hofstende's National Culture Model, it analyzes what causes culture diversity; furthermore, it analyzes the different management modes in cross-national countries, also the behaviors and impacts of culture conflict; then focusing on the cross cultural cooperation in R&D project, it raises the cross-cultural management topic. With the questionnaire aimed at members who used to or currently be in cross-national R&D projects, via doing SPSS factor analysis on the questionnaire's related part which focus on figuring out what formed a cultural conflict, eight culture factors (behaviors, environment, authorization, team building, organization, language communication, thinking, team objective) are proposed. Then, the priority among these factors is figured out, too. At the end, this thesis takes Lucent Technologies R&D project as a case analysis, combined with research outcome, some recommendations for cross-cultural management are proposed.The main contributions of this thesis as following: (1) the cultural factors that might lead a cultural conflict in an international R&D project are proposed; (2) the priority among these factors are proposed; (3) recommendations for cross-cultural management in an international R&D project are proposed.