Culture Counts in IT Management
May 9, 2003
University Park, Pa. - Information technologies may transcend national boundaries, but management practices in one IT workplace culture don't always export well to another, according to researchers. And some practices, valued in one culture, may be redundant and even offensive in another.
For example, identification badges are worn for security reasons by employees of many American firms. Irish workers in a small IT firm where people knew each other, found the practice culturally insensitive, said Dr. Eileen Trauth, professor of information sciences and technology (IST) at Penn State.
"We tend to think all sites of a multicultural company are the same, but each particular workplace has a mix of industry culture, national culture and local culture," Trauth said. "Managers have to look at what's culturally appropriate."
If they don't, they risk diminished productivity, lost business opportunities and even employee absenteeism and turnover, said co-researcher Judith Weisinger, associate professor of management, New Mexico State University.
"The costs will be greater, the larger the company is," she added.
The researchers’ findings are described in "The Importance of Situating Culture in Cross-Cultural IT Management" published in the April issue of IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management's "Special Issue on Cultural Issues and IT Management."
For their research, the authors drew on their own experiences as well as on published articles on IT management involving multinational companies with locations in Japan and the United Kingdom; Japan and Europe; and the U.S. and Ireland.
Such multinational companies have had to work with what the authors characterize as “explicit characteristics of the cultural context”: multiple languages, differences in local laws affecting data protection and privacy, and levels of national information infrastructures. But they argue that the less visible aspects of culture, such as its “unstated assumptions, values and norms,” also play a role in how well new management practices are integrated into the workplace.
And these unstated values and norms can be highly local or "situated." Managers at European sites of a Japanese multinational company valued information-systems planning at the local level. Headquarters wanted to do that planning without local input. That led to an undesirable outcome for local managers: systems unsuited to local needs, Trauth and Weisinger wrote.
Similarly, in the early years of the Irish IT industry, IT managers at American multinational companies in Ireland relied less upon formal credentials when hiring than did their counterparts in the U.S. The small size of the IT sector in Ireland enabled hiring to be based more on personal relationships, according to the researchers.
The researchers argue that before exporting management practices, IT managers need to understand the new location is a place with a history; a language and linguistic idiosyncrasies if English is spoken; customs, assumptions and values. Some may be shared; some may not.
"People take 'context' for granted and don't understand the impact that it has on behavior," Weisinger said. "All types of influences impact what people do within their work places, and we're recommending that managers pay more attention to that."
**mh**