Identifying Cross-Cultural Communication Barriers in Global IT Rollout Projects

Numerous studies have been undertaken to investigate the issues long-term expatriates and global leaders managing multicultural teams encounter. However, little research on cross-cultural communication challenges in project management has been conducted, particularly in the IT sector and rollout projects. Our research aims to investigate the effectiveness of cross-cultural communication in IT-related projects by identifying key challenging factors encountered by research participants. The purposive sampling criteria included “multiple years of experience in global IT rollout projects” and “working in multiple countries, including other continents as well”. These criteria provided a specific set of experience in multicultural social contexts based on which ten expert interviews were conducted. These global professionals come from a variety of cultural backgrounds and have worked in three to twelve countries (8,4 countries on average). An interpretative phenomenological approach has been applied, in which the interpretation of participants' lived experiences has been linked to relevant literature: cross-cultural communication and cultural profiles, organizational and national culture models, and cross-cultural project management. Our findings revealed six significant areas that emerged as key topics of intercultural problems in IT rollout projects: language, hidden assumptions, work-life balance, confrontation, time managements and apparent lies. The implications of our study derives from the experiences of the interviewed experts as they are recognized as individuals with valuable information and abilities developed through international experience that may be applied in multinational IT organizations.