Information technology sourcing across cultures: Preparing leaders for cross-cultural engagements and implementing best practices with cultural sensitivity

This research exercised a mixed method exploratory sequential design inquiry into the topical area of leadership behaviors and cross-cultural awareness that permeate successful global information technology (IT) outsource alliances. When IT is aligned with an entity's objectives, strategic technology leadership is actively engaged in governance, infrastructure architecture, planning, and cross-cultural collaboration. Bilateral contracting foster and forge interactive organizational cultures however, the advent of right shoring has introduced cultural complexity for IT leadership roles born of national, international, and sub-culture global dimensions. This research surfaced significant variations in IT professional opinions as to the leadership practices, cultural compatibility and service fulfillment performance factors in IT outsourcing alliances. The variations in response levels exceeded my expectation and raised my cultural awareness that when cross-cultural differences exist in global IT outsourcing alliance operations, virtual team members must accept such differences with applied cultural sensitivity. Also, while task-related conflicts may help to surface different perspectives and viewpoints and provide opportunities for exploring innovation, relationship and process conflicts may affect team cohesiveness and have negative influences on team performances regardless of adhering to agreed governance principles. To produce the proper group member interaction across cultures, individuals must reflectively monitor their sensitivity to combinations of internally diverse and potentially contested ways of acting to create highly distinctive and desirable group behavior across cultural clusters. This research demonstrates the strength of the situating cultural theory, applies it to specific domains of globally distributed IT service operations and contributes to literature by generating an in-depth understanding of cultural influences on global IT alliances. The electronic version of this Dissertation is at Ohio Link ETD Center, http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd.