The impact of cultural boundary spanners on global project network performance

Abstract

Architecture, engineering and construction projects are becoming increasingly global. In addition to understanding cultural differences, global project managers must be aware of the effects of these differences on performance. In this paper, we empirically examine the impact of cultural boundary spanners (CBSs) on global project network performance. Past research has examined collaboration in project networks comprising organizations from multiple countries. However, including CBSs to resolve cultural differences and investigating the resulting impact on performance have received limited attention. Through quantitative analyses of project network performance and participant communications, we found that cultural boundary-spanned multi-cultural networks significantly outperformed multi-cultural networks without CBSs and performed comparably to mono-cultural networks in initial performance. Analysis of participant communications revealed that CBSs communicated significantly more than other project participants during the first project, which may have been a key factor enabling those networks to achieve the initial performance of mono-cultural networks. CBSs can play a crucial role in off-setting the initial performance liability of working across cultural and linguistic boundaries in global project networks.