CROSS CULTURAL DIFFERENCES
Managers in today’s multicultural global business community frequently encounter cultural differences, which can interfere with the successful completion of projects. This paper describes the most well-known and accepted theories of cultural differences and illustrates them with examples from international project management. Two leading studies of cross-cultural management have been conducted by Geert Hofstede [1] and Fons Trompenaars [2]. Both approaches propose a set of cultural dimensions along which dominant value systems can be ordered. These value systems affect human thinking, feeling, and acting, and the behavior of organizations and institutions in predictable ways. The two sets of dimensions reflect basic problems that any society has to cope with but for which solutions differ. They are similar in some respects and different in others. The dimensions can be grouped into several categories: