Cross-cultural Leadership in the Implementation of Systems ...

Ika Safitri Windiarti (Defence and Systems Institute (DASI), University of South Australia)

Projects are often performed by people from diverse cultural backgrounds. The ability of engineers to manage and work in these cross-cultural teams includes cross-cultural leadership ability. Cross-cultural leadership competence for the engineers supports the quality of the project performance.

In this research we conduct a web survey addressing the perception of cross-cultural issues in the implementation of SE processes in projects. Several questions investigated the engineers? knowledge, experience, and perception of how they manage their intercultural relationship related to cross-cultural leadership.

Elements of Systems Engineering Processes

The international standard describing the systems engineering processes associated with the system lifecycle is ISO/IEC 15288. This standard is used as the basis of the INCOSE (International Council on Systems Engineering) Systems Engineering Handbook, which in turn is the foundation of the INCOSE systems engineering certification program(Windiarti, Ferris, and Berryman 2011b).
ISO/IEC 15288 divides the processes to support the system lifecycle into four groups: agreement; organizational project-enabling; project; and technical processes.

Indonesian Expatriate Engineers? Cross-Cultural Leadership Experience

All the participants were in a culturally diverse environment. Those who had familiarity with a multicultural work environment found that cross-cultural adaptation in their workplace was not a major challenge for work performance. They found that the multicultural team helped them to complement each other to improve project achievement and quality. In some cases the limited cross-cultural ability of engineers may reduce project performance rather than lead to improvement. What is leadership? Leadership is a role of influencing group of people or organization in terms of task and objectives, commitment and fulfillment of target achievement, group/organization identification and culture (Yukl 1989). Cross-cultural leadership is basically applying the leadership assignment in the multicultural work environment. General duty of the leader is to manage the achievements of the project goal and manage job distribution among the team member under leader?s authority. In cross-cultural leadership, power distance which was one of the Hofstede?s cultural dimension is take an important role (Hofstede 1983). The relationship between leader and follower is influenced by the perception about power distance based on their cultural background.

Conflict Management in the Multicultural Work Team

A 45.79% of the respondents answer that the project leader was resolving the conflicts that may occurred in the multicultural project team by using existing rules written in the project guidelines. This reveals that most of the project leaders preferred to make a judgment in the multicultural working environment based on existing rules rather than considering the cultural background of the team members. This result reflects a different result than was obtained in the pilot study, where conflict resolution was based on the uniqueness of each individual. The difference would appear to result from the survey requiring selection of a single response in contrast to the free-form response permitted in the interviews.

Decision Making in Multicultural Work Team

The research participants were asked about how the team members contribute their ideas to the leader?s decision in risky situations. Based on the accumulated answer, option D that decision is always made by collaboration of leader?s and members? ideas was being the most chosen among the research participants. Given the combined options, we found that the important decisions in the project team were made collaboratively, combining the leader?s ideas and members? contribution in analyzing the supporting ideas.

Completeness and perfection of the project vs relationships between the team members

The research participants were asked an open-ended question about which one is the most important thing for their organization.?Sixty nine answered that the completeness and perfection of the project is the most important thing for the organization. These engineers explained why they chose this option. In this survey a number of engineers explained their reason that the most important thing in the project is achieved project goal. Other reason was that the objective of the company or project is to make profit from the production and services. Some of the research participants are expatriate engineers who work based on the contract. Their job mainly accomplishing project?s target in a certain country (within the same company) and they will relocate to other country for other different project. This circumstances caused the engineers chose the relationship between team members is less important that completeness and perfection of the project.

In this question, 135 engineers answered that the most important thing in the organizations is the relationship between team members. Some of the research participants explained that good relationship among team member support the productivity of the team project in achieving project goal. As been discussed in previous section, in this part, cross-cultural leadership skills also become important in a project related with the importance of team relationship. The last reason is because a solid teamwork can be formed and with this solid teamwork the project will run well and the objective can be achieved.

From the survey result, 84 engineers answered that a combination of completeness and perfection of the project and relationships between the team members is useful for the project or organization.
Conclusions

This paper reports that as perceived by Indonesian engineers, the conflicts the project team was mostly resolved based on existing rules rather than considering the cultural background and the important decision in the project team was made by collaboration of leader?s ideas and member?s contribution in analyzing the supporting ideas. Other result from this study is that the relationships between team members were being the importance to the organization rather than the project completeness and perfection.

Engineers suggested that a combination of completeness and perfection of the project and relationships between the team members is valuable for the project or organization in implementing SE processes and their implication on the improvement of cross-cultural leadership capability.
Finally, for the future work, the diversity in project team allowed an appropriate cross-correlation analysis between background (experience, demographic, and type of industry) and the finding from this research in cross-cultural leadership or other topic.

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This article is prepared by Ika Safitri Windiarti, M.Eng.Adv. She is a PhD candidate from Defence and Systems Institute (DASI), University of South Australia

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Source: http://goliveindonesia.wordpress.com/2012/03/21/cross-cultural-leadership-in-the-implementation-of-systems-engineering-processes-a-study-of-indonesian-expatriate-engineers/

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