Achieving reliability in transnational work on complex projects: new directions for research

Abstract

The delivery of complex engineering projects today often involves globally distributed teams. In these teams, engineers must check for inadvertent errors by following the assumptions, logic and computations of others and define processes to reduce these errors. Engineering firms are thus increasingly using digital technologies to enable teams to do transnational work. While project management research on global virtual teams articulates how team performance relates to composition and characteristics, it has paid less attention to reliability and how this is achieved in such transnational work. This paper considers how constructs related to reliability—trust, culture and communication—become inter-related in work on complex projects. Recent research on work practice, which examines dynamics over time, is brought into dialogue with the literature on global virtual teams, re-conceptualizing trust as enacted in practice; culture as a resource for action and communication as a mediated dialogue. Vignettes from pilot work are used to support this re-conceptualization and illustrate how it extends research on teams to enable new insights into reliable performance in transnational work. The paper suggests a new agenda for project management research on achieving reliability in complex projects where delivery is digitally mediated and involves a global team, concluding by highlighting areas for further research.

Keywords:

• Engineering and construction
• global virtual teams
• reliability
• work practices

Notes

1. Etic and emic are two broad ways to operationalize the concept of culture, where etic is from the outside, and emic is from the inside. Thus from the first perspective, one culture can be compared with others on the same dimensions. From within, the unique characteristics of a particular culture which distinguishes it from others can be understood as more varied and nuanced. There are different methodologies to capture emic (e.g. ethnography) and etic (e.g. one questionnaire survey method) aspects of culture (Bala et al., 2012). Some scholars have attempted to combine both with local expressions of universal constructs and indigenously derived constructs providing a measure that is relevant to the specific cultural context (Leong et al., 2010).