Cultural Imperatives in Perceptions of Project Success and Failure

PROJECT MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE

CULTURAL IMPERATIVES IN PERCEPTIONS OF PROJECT SUCCESS AND FAILURE

Udechukwu Ojiako, PhD, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

Maxwell Chipulu, PhD, University of Southampton, UK

Paul Gardiner, PhD, British University, United Arab Emirates

Terry Williams, PhD, University of Hull, UK

Vital Anantatmula, DSc, Western Carolina University, US

Caroline Mota, PhD, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil

Stuart Maguire, PhD, University of Sheffield, UK

Yongyi Shou, PhD, Zhejiang University, China

Peter Nwilo, PhD, University of Lagos, Nigeria

Vachara Peansupap, PhD, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Cultural imperatives in perceptions of project success and failure / Udechukwu Ojiako

…[et al.].

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-935589-55-6 (alk. paper)

1. Diversity in the workplace. 2. Project management. I. Ojiako, Udechukwu.

HF5549.5.M5C85 2012

658.4'04--dc23

2012014269

ISBN: 978-1-935589-55-6

©2012 Project Management Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank those project stakeholders who not only agreed to be interviewed, but who also responded to our questionnaire surveys. We would like to specifically extend our gratitude to the following people at PMI; Sallie G. Makar, Dr. Carla Messikomer, Brianne Bangma, and Dr. Juan Carlos Nogueira. We would also like to thank Professor Brian Hobbs, Project Management Research Chair at Université du Québec à Montréal for his feedback on our initial proposal. We acknowledge with gratitude the help provided by Louise Roberts, who prepared our costing during our funding bid, and also Lindy Dalen and Christian Defeo of the Research Governance Team at the University of Southampton for their help.

We would off course like to thank PMI for providing the funding for the research, and Sophie N'Jai for patiently reading through and correcting the drafts of the manuscript. All opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations provided in this research are entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of either the Project Management Institute or the University of the Witwatersrand, University of Hull, University of Southampton, the University of Sheffield, Western Carolina University, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, the University of Lagos, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Zhejiang University, and the British University, United Arab Emirates.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES

LIST OF TABLES

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background

1.2 Development

1.3 The Study

CHAPTER TWO: OUTLINE OF THE RESEARCH

2.1 Introduction

2.2 Rationale

2.3 IS/IT and IS/IT-Enabled Change Projects

2.3.1 Focusing on IS/IT-Enabled Projects

2.3.2 Is the Study of Projects a Social Science?

2.3.3 The Nature of Projects

2.3.4 Managing Projects at a Time of Change

2.3.5 Project Success and Failure

CHAPTER THREE: CULTURE

3.1 Culture and the Challenge of Placement

3.2 The Culture-free Thesis

3.3 What is Culture?

3.4 Cultural Theory

3.5 Culture in Contemporary Management

3.6 Culture and Diversity in Project Management

3.7 Cultural Imperatives in Project Management

CHAPTER FOUR: COGNITION, PERCEPTIONS AND CULTURE

4.1 Social Cognition and Psychology

4.2 Values

CHAPTER FIVE: RESEARCH METHOD

5.1 Conceiving the Research Methodology

5.1.1 Language

5.1.2 Instrumentation

5.1.3 Administration

5.1.4 Response Equivalence

5.2 Developing the Data-Gathering Tool

5.4 The Pilot Study

5.5 Questionnaire Design

CHAPTER SIX: SURVEY DATA ANALYSIS AND RESULTS

6.1 Objective

6.2 The Survey Data and Relevant Factors

6.3 Data Analysis Techniques

6.3.1 Preliminary data analysis

6.4 Results

6.4.1 Preliminary Data Analysis Results

6.4.2 Nationality and its Interaction with Culture

6.4.3 Age

6.4.4 Gender

6.4.5 Project Roles

6.5 Hypothesis 1: Interactions of Cultural Perspectives, Project Environments and Importance of Project/Success Failure Factors

6.5.1 SEM Model Fit

6.5.2 Impact of Cultural Factors on Project Environments and Importance of PSFFs

6.5.3 The Uni-dimensionality of the Assignation of Importance of PSFFs

6.6 Hypothesis 2: Exploring the Impact of Cultural Perspectives and Project Environments on Stages of the Project Cycle when Views of PSFFs are Formed and/or Revised

6.7 Hypothesis 3: Exploring Views on the Scale of Project Success or Failure

6.8 Summary of Data Analysis Results

CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSION

REFERENCES

APPENDIX A: SECONDARY INTERVIEW CODING

APPENDIX B: INITIAL CULTURAL DISPOSITION QUESTION

APPENDIX C: THE REVISED QUESTIONNAIRE

LIST OF FIGURES

CHAPTER 5

Figure 5.1. Research Methodology

Figure 5.2. Country Clusters

CHAPTER 6

Figure 6.1. Hypothetical dependencies: Cultural Factors and Project Perceptions

Figure 6.2. Global Distribution of Respondents by Residence

Figure 6.3. Global Distribution of Respondents by Birth

Figure 6.4. Location of Country means on Hofstede's Four Dimensions

Figure 6.5. Significant Differences by Gender

Figure 6.6. Project Role Distributions (Original and Combined Groups)

Figure 6.7. (Overall) Importance of PSFFs by Project Role

Figure 6.8. Final Structural Equation Model Results

Figure 6.9. % Variance Explained by each Component (CATPCA-Bootstrapping)

Figure 6.10. Estimated Parameter Values: Initial View of Success (or Failure) in Life-cycle

Figure 6.11. Estimated Parameter Values: Revised View of Success (or Failure) in Life-cycle

LIST OF TABLES

CHAPTER 5

Table 5.1. Initial Interview Categories

Table 5.2. Hofstede-inspired Mapping of the Sampled Countries

Table 5.3. Secondary Interview Categories

CHAPTER 6

Table 6.1. Factors Derived from the Data

Table 6.2. Total Effects of Explanatory Variables on Dependents

Table 6.3. Amount of variance of Each PSFF Factor Explained

Table 6.4. CATPCA Results: Component Loadings

Table 6.5. Pseudo R-Square Values Logistic Models

Chapter One: Introduction

1.1 Background

Primarily driven by developments in information systems and information technology, IS/IT projects are now operating in a global context. The globalization of IS/IT now means that project teams are increasingly diversified culturally. Such diversity, as one might imagine, serves as a major catalyst in the creation of uncertainty. In fact, the view of the growing importance of culture in the organization is re-emphasized by scholars such as Javidan et al. (2006), who, in their quest to provide an integrated relationship theory of culture encompassing not only the organization but leadership effectiveness, point out that hardly any organization will be immune to the effects of globalization (p. 67). For this reason, there is a compelling case for a research exercise that focuses on how cultural imperatives impact perceptions of success and failure in projects. In the first place, although existing studies that infer a cultural focus in projects do exist, they have not been extensively addressed in literature; neither have the studies conducted been truly global (for example, most studies are limited cases on Africa, South America, and South Asia). In addition, we also highlight that although a number of case studies have been carried out within the area of project failure, they have either been explored at a distance by researchers who do not truly understand the cultural imperative (by being part of this cultural makeup) or by teams that do not truly represent the cultural diversity that characterizes today's global projects.

1.2 Development

The topic of failure in projects and IS/IT or IS/IT-enabled change projects is important, especially for organizations that have sought to incorporate IS/IT into their core competitive capability framework. Research not only highlights projects as a proven approach to the successful organization and implementation of operations (Hobday, 2000; Ruuska and Teigland, 2009; Shenhar and Dvir, 1996), but also that their failure has a major impact on the operational viability of organizations (Nightingale, 2000; Poon and Wagner, 2001), especially when lessons are not learnt (Engwall, 2003; Williams, 2008). Today's projects, especially those being deployed to facilitate change, are characterized by their complexity (Dvir et al., 1998; Tatikonda and Rosenthal, 2000), innovativeness (Lhuillery and Pfister, 2009), and differences in managerial practice. With the increase in the number of multinational corporations (MNCs) and the popularity of enterprise resource planning (ERP), projects with a substantial IS/IT content are likely to cross national boundaries. On the other hand, even if the firm engaged in project delivery is not an MNC, there is every chance that its suppliers, subcontractors, or partners are based outside national or cultural borders. It is also possible that a significant number of of the firm's employees and staff have origins from different national, regional, cultural, ethnic, tribal, and religious backgrounds (de Bony, 2010). Although diversity no doubt creates a project environment that is extremely intense and dynamic, it is also fraught with dangers for the project. This is because differences in national, regional, cultural, ethnic, tribal, and religious backgrounds, if not managed, have the potential to become the focus of discord and segregation within the project. This is due to the fact that these attributes form an essential element of our personalities, which ultimately shapes individual perceptions (Belout and Gauvreau, 2004; Heine and Buchtel, 2009; Markus and Shinobu, 1991; Zwikael, Shimizu and Globerson, 2005). Because of the challenges they face, project teams, although heterogenous, must work towards a homegenous project objective. For this reason, sharing and maintaining a shared vision of the project is of paramount importance.

1.3 The Study

In the middle of 2009, while employed as a Lecturer in Project Management at the University of Southampton, UK, along with nine other scholars from seven countries across the globe, Dr Udechukwu Ojiako responded to a request for research proposals from the Project Management Institute (PMI), USA, with a proposal to explore the effect of global cultural perspectives in perceptions of project success and failure. The grant for this study was awarded in January 2010.

Our study has been inspired by work on cultural imperatives in management pioneered in earlier work by scholars such as Hofstede (1980a, 1983, and 1984), Checkland and Scholes (1990), and Stull and Von Till (1995). Hofstede's work is particularly relevant as it demonstrated that management practice was primarily conditioned by cultural imperatives; in effect, she argued that patterns of behavior, beliefs, attitudes, and values can be influenced by a range of environmental factors. Checkland and Scholes, on the other hand, discuss changes brought about by IS/IT implementation that need to be both systemically desirable and culturally feasible. We utilized the work conducted by Stull and von Till (1995) to then measure interviewee disposition towards the first four dimensions of Hofstede.

The importance of cultural imperatives within the context of projects and project management is well recognized in existing scholarship (Checkland and Scholes, 1990; Hofstede, 1980a, 1983, 1984; Stull and Von Till, 1995). The recognition is particularly important because projects are fundamentally delivered by people—and culture, which is manifested in various parameters, such as language and communication, represents, in the words of Swidler (2003), the most poignant symbolic form of expression of the human experience. In effect, it is highly unlikely that meaningful research that has a human dimension can be undertaken in a concise form without an element of cultural discourse. The degree of this discourse is, however, dependent on the focus of the research. In this case, a focus on perceptions is seen, based on earlier work of scholars such as Rohner (1984), Boykin et al. (2005), and Spencer-Rodgers et al. (2007), to be heavily laden with cultural imperatives. For this reason, culture has been identified as a parameter that can influence whether a project is perceived to have either succeeded or failed (see Muriithi and Crawford, 2003).

Nevertheless, existing scholarship on the cultural dimensions of project success and failure perceptions that are largely determined by cultural differences in value (see Hofstede, 1980a, 1980b) and evaluation (see Heine, Kitayama, and Lehman, 2001) have remained limited in scope. Although it appears that cultural issues have been discussed widely in empirical research (Henries and Sousa-Poza, 2005) and formal analysis (Chan and Tse, 2003), our review of project management research conducted between 1960 and 2003 shows that such studies are both infrequent and limited. Scholarship on the cultural dimensions of project success and failure perceptions also suffers from the fact that most research in this area is not representative of the global nature of project management since it tends to present a single view, which is based predominantly on Western outlooks (Baumeister, 1987). The reality, however, is that the configuration of most projects and project teams is changing, especially with increased globalization. Based on this brief review, the aim of this study will be to: (i) examine whether current project failure measures are still viable; (ii) examine how cultural context impacts on our project failure understanding; and (iii) examine, using a three-staged mixed research approach, whether different nationalities (cultures) view success/failure differently. To address these aims, we set out to answer the following specific research questions.

1. Research Question 1 (RQ1): Are current project failure measures still viable in a global context?

2. Research Question 2 (RQ2): Does cultural context impact on project failure understanding?

3. Research Question 3 (RQ3): How do different country stakeholders perceive project failure? Are there trends in national and cultural perceptions?

The study is of particular relevance because as projects increasingly take on a global dimension, provision of global perspectives to stakeholders becomes more crucial. Such perspectives will also ensure that project managers are more likely to place culture (and its social impact) at the forefront of their management endeavors (Trompenaars and Williams, 1999).

Dr. Udechukwu Ojiako (University of the Witwatersrand, RSA) served as principal investigator for a research team comprising the following scholars: ¹ Dr. Vittal Anantatmula (Western Carolina University, US), Dr. Maxwell Chipulu (University of Southampton, UK), Dr. Paul Gardiner (British University, United Arab Emirates), Dr. Stuart Maguire (University of Sheffield, UK), Professor Peter Nwilo (University of Lagos, Nigeria), Dr. Caroline Mota (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil), Dr. Vachara Peansupap (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand), Professor Terry Williams (University of Hull, UK), and Dr. Shou Yongyi (Zhejiang University, China).

The book is divided into seven chapters, beginning with this chapter (serving as an overall introduction to the paper). Chapter 2 provides an outline to the research focusing for example on the reality of projects. While in chapter 3, we review relevant literature on culture, in chapter 4, we review literature on cognition and the framing of perceptions. In particular, we explore cognition from a cross-cultural perspective. Chapter 5 is the research methodology, while in chapter 6, we conduct an analysis of the data and also present our results and findings. The conclusions are presented in chapter 7.

1 Names in alphabetical order.

Chapter Two: Outline of the Research

2.1 Introduction

This chapter describes the results of the literature review that covers the three main building blocks of the study: the first building block focuses on failure in projects, the second focuses on culture, and the third focuses on imperatives and cognition. To undertaken the review of the literature, searches were conducted within