بررسی نقش فرهنگ ملی در مدیریت پروژه های علمی بین المللی در مقیاس بزرگ

Collaborative projects extending across national boundaries introduce their own set of project management challenges. These challenges begin when individuals from different organizations, from different countries, and from different value systems must share authority, responsibility, and decision-making. But national culture and its influence on the project management process have received little emphasis in the literature. Using evidence from two case studies, this paper explores the role of national culture in the management of large-scale science projects. It raises questions about the relevance of this topic, proposes a method for studying the role of culture in the management process, and concludes with recommendations for those who manage these projects.

The management of collaborative international projects is similar in many respects to the management of more conventional business projects [1]. Plans must be made, financing negotiated, resources organized, schedules created, and activities controlled. But these projects are more complex because they often require cooperation from organizations or groups whose managers come from countries where management processes and decision-making behavior are very different [1]. One underlying factor that helps to explain and understand these differences is the national culture in which these managers have been raised, educated, and trained. This paper explores the role of national culture in the management of large-scale science projects through two case studies. Large-scale science projects were chosen as the subject for this study because there has been a long history of these projects in Europe, Japan, Russia, and the United States, because these studies involve significant sums of money, because they address significant societal issues, and because they are public projects facilitating the collection of data and access to management staff [2], [3] and [4]. Both projects, using Shenhar's [5] topology, can be classified as Super Tech Projects; key technologies do not exist when the project is initiated. The first project studied is the Joint European Torus, JET, and the second, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, ITER. Each project includes multiple national cultures and provides a rich environment for studying the role of culture in project management. The paper begins by raising the relevance of this topic, proposes a method for studying the role of culture in the management process, explores culture's role in JET and ITER, and concludes with recommendations for those who manage international collaborative projects.

Most managers engaged in international projects would agree that project management is influenced by culture. Exactly how culture affects management, however, is a question that most would find difficult to answer. The purpose of this paper was to conduct interviews with project managers to begin to explore this connection. The evidence suggests that power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, humane treatment, and future orientation are dimensions of culture that are linked to project management and that these dimensions can be useful in explaining the preferences that guide management behavior and decision-making. A very reasonable question to ask is, does this knowledge help project managers? The answer is that it may help because it provides them with a framework to explore the complexities of the management process, and by using this framework develop a more realistic way of understanding and managing the differences that are inevitable in international projects. Care must be taken when generalizing the findings of this study to other projects. In this study, the expenditures were in the range of several billion US dollars, and the political influence of governments was substantial. Still, there may be basic human patterns, differentiated by culture, that may be applied to a wider range of projects, especially in this age when projects are becoming larger and international cooperation more common. What would now be helpful is to conduct further studies that explore this issue in greater detail and to conduct studies in other project areas that might suggest a theory of culture in international project management.