Analysing cultural problems in international projects

With the fast development of globalisation, more and more construction projects involve participants from different countries or different cultural backgrounds. This challenges previous approaches and is creating a new context for the industry. Besides the obvious language barrier, people from different cultural backgrounds may also have different faiths, assumptions and behaviour norms which can and do cause conflicts. As part of a wider project to establish how practitioners can work more effectively in cross cultural situations, this paper describes the authors' recent experience of working with a Chinese partner on a master planning project, and discusses some of the issues arising from the multicultural project environment. The analysis uses personal construct theory to interpret many of the problems in perception and communications and also to reveal the problem of emotion. It concludes that to work effectively in such a situation, we need to work with our personal constructs and pay more attention to informal communications.