Western Management Style

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Chinese versus Western Styles of Project Management
GENG Yiming 54257474
Abstract: One soil nurtures one culture. Cultural differences will inevitably lead to differences in management. Facing their various production environments, social background and development objectives, management thought and practices will produce different results in each country, forming their corresponding management theory and management models and methods.
Keywords: management differences; cultural root; China; West
1 Introduction
Over the past five decades, the Western business areas firmly established the career of the project management, while China has not been affected in this regard until the economic reforms. Since the 1980s, the Western project management …show more content…

Pant et al. found that matrix organizational structure in Nepal was not as useful as in Western countries, because the management teams in Nepal have serious bureaucracy. England described the very successful management rule in Japan, Z theory, had been constrained in the US application.
Easterby-Smith et al. concluded that the Chinese people concerning on "guanxi", gregarious and face limited the adoption of Western human resource management system in China.

Based on similar studies described above, we discussed hereinafter, due to the existing significant differences in Chinese and Western culture, the realization of project management practices from Chinese and Western project managers is probably different. Now, seven theoretical arguments on how the cultural differences affect the project managers have been summarized.
2 Theoretical arguments
2.1 …show more content…

The West has strong project management targeted tasks, so the project team is temporarily component to accomplish a specific task; the relationships are subordinated to tasks. For the Chinese project managers, by contrast, the relationships of friendly cooperation between team members determine whether they can successful complete the task. Therefore:

Relative to the task, the Chinese project manager will spend more effort to establish and maintain personal relationships between members of the project team.

On contrary, Chinese culture emphasizes the ranks and in order to maintain harmony between the interests of each other, pay attention to long-term cooperation.

In modern China, people engaged in commercial activities also sign a contract, but the residual effects of deep-rooted cultural values of Chinese style, making the potential relationship more important than the contract itself. Meanwhile, the bidding and awarding procedures implemented today in China are likely to form the hierarchy of owners, contractors, and subcontractors.

Therefore, we recommend:

Chinese project managers tend to put the owner as the parent, valuing long-term cooperation with the owners. The Western project managers tend to put contract owners as equal partners, valuing signing a good contract with

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