How National Culture Impacts the Success of Project Customer Engagement: An Empirical Investigation

This article reports the preliminary results of an empirical study investigating the success factors for culturally appropriate and effective project customer engagement. Ongoing globalization, increasing complexity and a strong trend towards project customer integration make this an important endeavor. The findings are extracted from 23 semi-structured qualitative interviews that were conducted between October 2015 and April 2016. Building on previous research the authors identify a research gap in the area of intercultural project customer integration, explain their process of investigating the issue at hand, and extract success factors from a number of qualitative semi-structured interviews. The results of this study are considered preliminary because a detailed qualitative analysis of interview transcripts is not yet concluded. Identified success factors are presented in two sets of replies: first, the impact of culture and the lessons learned from that, and second, the particularities of the customer relationship and the behavioral success factors for that relationship. Future research should aim at qualifying these factors and synthesize them into a practical framework for project management and project research.