The influence of national culture on conflict in project management: How organizations manage conflict

Project managers interact with individuals from different national cultures, especially when working on global projects. Culturally diverse teams create unique challenges that project managers must address to maintain project success. The problem addressed by this study is whether national culture influences conflict management during project management in the United States. As business owners work to create new products or results, there is a need to understand how the project team members' relationships will affect it. The purpose of this quantitative research study was to test the theory of conflict management and the project management theory for relationships and whether national culture influences conflict management for organizations during project management. This research design's nature was quantitative and will utilize a causal-comparative approach to research national culture's influence on conflict management during project management. The study seeks to understand whether conflict contributes significantly to project management conflicts and whether the type of culture contributes to the resolution type. This study had 38 research participants that have at least five years of noncurrent project management experience. The participants completed the Rahim Organizational Conflict Inventory-II and the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument for the survey questions. Multiple regression with effect coding was used for data analysis. The two-way ANOVA and a t-test were used to identify any variances. The findings show that culture does significantly contribute to conflicts during project management. Depending on the instrument used, culture may not provide a significant contribution to the conflict resolution type. These results imply that even with constant work between various cultures, project managers need to understand the different national cultures to diffuse conflicts that can arise, not to derail projects. Future research should include a larger sample size for more data to gain a holistic view or concentrate only on specific project types like construction or information technology to find differences present by classification.