The Role of Organizational Culture in IT Outsourcing Relationships: A Buyer Company Approach

Globalization has affected the organizations in different aspects such as structure, architecture, internal/external strategies and sourcing management. Outsourcing is one of the recent business strategies used to provide IT needs via external agents. The relationship between the service buyer and provider companies is a constituent playing a significant role in IT outsourcing success or failure. The questions in this research is " what is the role of organizational culture in ITO (IT Outsourcing) relationships? " This research has a focus on the influence of organizational culture of buyer companies on the specific factors of trust, cooperation, communication and commitment in their relationship with the IT service provider. A qualitative approach has been used and six global companies using ITO are selected to have interviews with their relevant managers which revealed the presence of organizational culture effect. Particularly, being innovative, having open discussion as an organizational culture, looking for extending contracts with providers as a strategy in organizational structure and responsibility and roles clarifying after outsourcing, appeared as the major differences between the six companies organizational cultures which influence the focusing aspects of ITO relationships in this research. Additionally there were some external factors found after the analysis phase which were out of the scope of the research theoretical framework such as previous experience of buyer company in outsourcing, IT governance and the value of IT in the buyer company. These extra issues can be linked to the organizational culture of the buyer company and affect their IT outsourcing relationships.