Using scripts to address cultural and institutional challenges of global project coordination

Complex project work often is carried out by groups spanning national and cultural boundaries. This work is vulnerable to poorly understood coordination breakdowns that can lead to project delay and failure. We conceptualize coordination breakdowns to be driven by differences in cognitive and behavioral scripts for coordination of the task. We propose that script differences emerge from cultural and institutional influences on role structures, temporal structures, and cues. This conceptualization integrates theory concerning cultural differences and institutions to understand coordination breakdowns. We also propose that coordination scripts draw on overarching sociocultural templates for coordination, and we provide examples from four cultures. The concepts of coordination scripts and cultural coordination templates open new avenues of research and benefit global project coordination and mitigation of risk.