Impact of national culture in projects involving organizational culture change:

Renault-Nissan Alliance case-study

Resumen

Globalization exerts a significant impact on project management processes by adding the complexity to operate across borders and in multicultural environments. For that reason, international collaborations require cultural affairs to be at the center of business strategies to avoid conflicts with the host country practices. For instance, Japan has unique business practices compared to most Western countries, and those must be considered in an eventual organizational culture change. This paper aims to demonstrate the importance of respecting national culture's boundaries in organizational culture change of international projects. Therefore, it will describe some peculiarities of Japanese business culture and how they were formed while making a parallel comparison with western business practices. A case study of the first project of the Renault-Nissan Alliance was applied to highlight the contrasts of Japanese and Western business practices. To understand the complexities of culture from different angles, this paper divided the research into different phases, each exploring the different cultural aspects of Japanese and French business practices in the context of the Renault-Nissan Alliance, using a mix of different theories. The theoretical approach was reinforced with interviews with two high-level executives of Renault and Nissan. The study was able to identify several cultural disparities between Japan and France that impacted the Alliance in the long run while offering an alternative solution to help project managers to improve strategies for inter-cultural collaborations.