Cross-cultural Virtual Design Teams: Cultural Influences on Team Performance in Global Projects

Globalization of the construction industry has brought unique challenges such as coordination among project participants from different countries. This research attempts to understand cultural differences in international joint-venture (IJV) teams composed of Japanese and American participants, and to develop a prototype computational model— “Cross-Cultural”-Virtual Design Team (CC-VDT)—to seek better organization designs for cross-cultural engineering teams. Based on our case studies, we characterize cultural differences along the dimension of cultural values and cultural practices. Cultural values refer to an individual’s preferences in decision making and communication. Cultural practices include the cultural norms for adopting specific coordination mechanisms to control organizations and tasks. CC-VDT incorporates value-practice dimensions based on our observations and a literature survey. The simulated results of the effects of cultural impacts are qualitatively consistent with cultural contingency theory and our observations, validating the reasoning of CC-VDT. These results extend the possibility of using simulation modeling to capture distinguishing cross-cultural phenomena that emerge in global construction projects.