Impact of multiple normative systems on the organizational performance of international joint ventures (Japan)

Research on international joint-venture (IJV) teams reveals high failure rates for projects, due to difficulties in managing mixed-cultural teams. This thesis attempts to understand, analyze, and model how cultural differences between US and Japanese firms in IJV teams affect project performance, using case studies and computational experimentations. We characterize cultural differences using two dimensions: cultural values and practices. Cultural values refer to standards for evaluating behaviors that people show in making task-related and communication-related decisions. Cultural practices include cultural norms for using specific organization designs to manage organizations and tasks. My case studies reveal that US and Japanese firms have their own sets of cultural values and practices, named culturally-driven normative systems.; This thesis uses the Virtual Design Team (VDT) computational simulation model of project organizations in order to analyze the effect of culturally-driven normative systems on project performance from an information processing view point. I conduct intellective experiments for both single and mixed cultural cases. The experimental design uses two sets of independent variables: project descriptions and organization descriptions. Project descriptions include task complexity at four levels and team experience at three levels, yielding twelve project contexts. Cultural values and practices are linked to individual behavior patterns and organization styles respectively. I simulate the possible combinations of cultural values and practices in each project context to predict project work volume, cost, duration, and quality outcomes.; Simulation results show that: (1) each cultural team (cultural values) shows better performance when using its own organization style (cultural practices); (2) the US organization style reduces the negative impacts of having mixed cultural teams compared to the Japanese organization style, while the Japanese organization style shows better performance in project quality outcomes; (3) Mixed cultural teams can be less efficient (i.e., 70% worse) or slightly more efficient (i.e., 30% improved) than single cultural cases; and (4) high matrix strength improves both project duration and work volume, but does not affect project quality outcomes for mixed-cultural teams. These simulation results and statistical analyses are qualitatively consistent with organizational and cultural contingency theory, and with limited observations of US-Japanese IJV project teams.