VOSS: Culture and Coordination in Global Engineering Teams

George Mason University, Fairfax VA

Investigators

Abstract

Construction engineering provides the foundation for society: the buildings, bridges, roads and other infrastructure we use every day. Engineering work has become increasingly complex, and big engineering projects are almost always undertaken by teams of engineers whose members are multicultural and distributed around the globe. Effective coordination is crucial for success, yet recent research suggests that team coordination practices vary with national culture. Experts have warned that engineering education fails to prepare engineers for these differences. We will use scripts theory, which lies at the intersection of the fields of social psychology and artificial intelligence, to characterize the culturally-specific coordination practices of engineering teams, introducing the notion of "cultural coordination scripts." We will 1) characterize and understand the coordination scripts of several specific cultures, 2) show how cultural coordination scripts are intertwined with technical training and technical tasks and 3) determine how differences in cultural coordination scripts in multi-cultural globally-distributed teams affect their capacity to coordinate highly precise work and achieve innovative, safe, timely and cost-effective outcomes. We seek to predict likely points of coordination failure. Data collection will include unobtrusive longitudinal observation of the coordination activities of mono-cultural and multi-cultural collocated and distributed engineering design teams. This research program will help engineers -- and others who work in multicultural, multi-national project teams -- become more adept in anticipating and working across different cultural expectations related to project coordination. Recommendations will be developed for engineering education and practice. Cultural differences in coordination practices are understudied across domains of application, so our work will provide new knowledge concerning this central team process. We also offer a new approach to capturing the complexity of teamwork "an approach grounded in scripts theory" that has the potential to influence research across disciplines.