Challenges and skills: Managing multicultural software project teams

The problem of cross-cultural complexity is a hindrance to effective multicultural-team leadership across many industries (Ochieng and Price, 2009). Studies have revealed that cultural differences among project team members caused conflict, misunderstanding, and poor project performance (Ochieng et al., 2013a; Park and Kang, 2012). The cultural implications and the challenges that result from the utilization of a culturally diverse project team have not be extensively explored in the information technology industry (Ochieng et al., 2013a). Furthermore, the skill requirements for project managers (PMs) in multicultural informationtechnology projects have not been widely studied in the past, especially in terms of their relative importance in overcoming the challenges presented by multicultural teams (Keil et al., 2013). This study, which focused on the software-development arena, explored, first, the cross-cultural complexities faced by experienced PMs that have managed multicultural software-development project teams and, second, the skills required by PMs to face these complexities.