The Impact of Cultural Differences on Project Stakeholder Engagement: A Review of Case Study Research in International Project Management

Engaging project stakeholder from different national cultures remains a major challenge for project managers in international projects. The success of projects and project management depends to a significant degree on the effective and appropriate interaction with project stakeholders across cultural boundaries. This paper uses a structured approach of qualitative content analysis for identifying impact factors from a number of published empirical case studies. The research question that this article aims to answer is: Which factors impact the successful integration of project stakeholders and how can they be conceptualized into usable knowledge for project managers? After shortly introducing the topic and laying out the fundamental definitions in section 1, the 2nd section will describe how the literature review was conducted and how the studies were selected. Section 3 describes the selected methodology of the authors, and the 4th part will present the identified factors in the framework of Hall's Iceberg Model. The conclusions will be reflected in the last section together with an outlook into possible complementary research in the area of intercultural project management.