Towards Identifying Success Factors for Cross-cultural Project Customer Engagement: A Literature Review

Cross-cultural project management remains an important challenge for project managers and project management scholars. Successful projects need to effectively engage project customers and the key question becomes how to adequately engage project customers from foreign cultural backgrounds. This paper presents the preliminary results of a literature review in cross-cultural project customer integration. The guiding question for the review is: Which success factors can be identified in scientific literature for the cross-cultural integration of customers in projects. The paper introduces the topic and shortly lays out the necessary definitions before presenting the reviewed literature that is relevant to the review question. The literature is categorized and analyzed on abstract and findings level. The preliminary analysis reveals that the cross-cultural integration of project customers is not well researched and that further investigation in these areas is necessary. Future research is going to deepen the analysis of the presented studies. The aim is to lay the groundwork for further empirical research into success factors for customer integration in intercultural projects.