Turning cross-cultural management conflict into collaboration: Indian and Romanian experiences in Global Project Teams

Global project virtual teams are increasingly common as organizations strive to maintain a global presence, find top and diverse talent, and cope with economic constraints. They include members from multiple nations and cultures who must work together while being separated by time and space. An internal research, which has been conducted in an international company active in the industrial sector of financial services, provides few insights into how integrating the Western values of individualism and low power distance with the Eastern values of collectivism and high power distance may influence cross-cultural conflict management. The purpose of this paper is to directly examine the impact of organization-level collectivism and individualism as well as high and low power distance – in case of global project teams that include Romanian and Indian experts – in order to determine the interactive effects of these factors on cross-cultural conflict management. The authors sustain the idea that understanding intercultural dynamics can facilitate collaboration and reduce conflicts in intercultural encounters at the individual, organization, and probably societal levels. Methodological approach is to use both secondary literature survey and primary research methods as interviews and short case-examples from authors’ direct consulting experience while working with global project teams. This pilot study – as part of a larger research project – contributes to fill one gap in the understanding of culturally heterogeneous project teams and is the starting-point for additional investigation in this area.