Investigation of the Impact of National Culture on IT-Governance: An Explorative Study Contrasting German and Japanese National Culture

The ever rising complexity of the corporate IT forces organizations, especially the ones acting internationally, to take measures managing their IT. IT-Governance is one measure to maintain control. IT-Governance is no end in itself, yet, there is a strong need of skilled worker implementing and executing it effectively and efficiently. Problematically, in the global IT-Industry there is a skilled worker shortage. Organizations try to recruit skilled foreign worker to cope with this shortage, which pairs up people from diverse countries and therefore leads to an international workforce. Consequently, this paper aims for deriving national cultural concepts that influence IT-Governance. Hofstede’s dimensional model and the COBIT framework serve as a basis for the conceptual model in this paper. Validating this conceptual model and its respective propositions, qualitative interviews with experts from practice were conducted to validate the conceptual model. Our results suggest that national culture has a great impact on IT-Governance.