The intercultural project organization: A Collabyrinth In the execution of a project, collaboration i inevitable. During a four-year research project I studied how collaboration became manifest in the everyday work life of project participants in the Panama Canal Expansion Program. The journey towards developing a collaborative relationshi can be seen as a collabyrinth. This neology of ‘collaboration’ and ‘labyrinth’ reflects the complicatedness of collaboration.
Even before signing starting a project, parties can conduct a ‘culture scan’. Dr. Karen Smits Identifying the cultural ksmits@hotmail.com LinkedIn: differences and http://www.linkedin.com/in/ksmit similarities at an early Twitter stage of collaboration, @Karen_Smits decreases the risk of a painful culture clash during the execution of a project. A better understanding of the cultural aspects that come together in a project organization supports project participants i accepting and anticipating on cultural aspects li organizational beaviour, work ethics and meeting styles. Hence, explicit attention to cultural aspect in the project environment increases collaboration among its project participants and will, in turn, affect the project’s end result.
Project organizatios generally consist of employees residing from various specialized organizations bringing numerous cultural differences and similarities, distinctive practi and differing values and interests for participatio to the work floor. A collabyrinth demonstrates the complexity of working together across cultures and illustrates the practices of collaboration tha emerged in the project organization under study In the Panama Canal Expansion Program I found a wide variety of practices of collaboration ‘Submarining’, for example, illustrates that actors recur to traditional behaviour and mark boundaries based upon cultural aspects and project office locations. These diminishing practices led t separation and fragmentation among the projec participants and creted distance between them. Nevertheless, as project participants came to recognize the need for a collaborative relationship several amplifying practices evolved. As such, ‘crafting reciprocal relations’ expresses th willingness to collaborate and is enacted in activities that bridge the cultural divide so that despite the complexities, people developed ways to enhance a collaborative relationshi The study stresses the importance of highlighting culture and collaboration on the project management agenda. Unravelling the cultural complexity helps us to understand what is actually going on in a project organization and to obtain better insight into the lived experiences of project participants.
Click here to download Karen’s book “Cross Culture Work: Practices of collaboration in the Panama Canal Expansion Program”
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