Cultural differences in project management capabilities: A field study

Abstract

This paper presents a study on identifying differences in project management style, between two different cultures, the Japanese and the Israeli. Management styles were evaluated on the nine classical project management areas, as defined by PMBOK, and on the organizational support required for a proper project management infrastructure. A total of 425 project managers were involved in the study, out of which 337 were from Israel and 88 were from Japan. Significant cultural differences were found between the two countries. Israeli project managers are more focused on performing “Scope” and “Time” management processes, assisted by project management software, while formal “Communications” and “Cost” management are more frequently used by Japanese project managers. It was also found that Japanese organizations use clear and measurable success measures for each project, while project objectives in Israel are often quite foggy. Differences in efforts made by project managers and management of the organization on specific project processes are demonstrated and discussed in this paper. These differences are manifested by smaller costs and schedule overruns in Japanese organizations, while Israeli customers of local projects seem to obtain better technical performance at the end of the project. The Israeli customer, however, is much more impacted by superior technical performance and easily forgives cost and schedule overruns.