Impact of national culture in projects involving organizational culture change: Japanese Business Practices

Globalization exerts a significant impact on project management processes by adding the complexity to operate across borders and in multicultural environments. For that reason, international collaborations require cultural affairs to be at the center of business strategies to avoid conflicts with the host country practices. For instance, Japan has unique business practices compared to most Western countries, and those must be considered in an eventual organizational culture change. The aim was to understand the importance of working the organizational culture in international projects. Therefore, it will describe some peculiarities of Japanese business culture and how they were formed while making a parallel comparison with western business practices. An observational study of the first project of an Alliance between a Japanese multinational automobile manufacturer (JMAM) and a French multinational automobile manufacturer (FMAM) was applied to highlight the contrasts of Japanese and Western business practices. To understand the complexities of culture from different angles, this paper divided the research into different phases, each exploring the different cultural aspects of Japanese and French business practices in the context of the JMAM-FMAM Alliance, using a mix of different theories. The theoretical approach was reinforced with interviews with two high-level executives of the JMAM-FMAM. The study identified disparities between organizational cultural of Japan and France that affected the Alliance in the long term and suggested an alternative solution to help project managers to improve strategies for intercultural collaborations.