Business relationships: A cross-culture management investigation in the UAE construction industry

Recently, the UAB has witnessed an increase of foreign direct investments in the construction industry sector and where people from distinct national cultures are confronted with unfamiliar interaction patterns and communication styles, different business goals and logic, all of which may be difficult to deal with or interpret. In the present scenario, effective cross-cultural management has become essential for the success of business relationships. The existing literature is mainly concerned with relationships involving parties within single cultural domains and lacks conceptualization beyond borders. Although a lot of scholars have produced numerous valuable works on cross-cultural management, communication, and marketing, they seem to agree that most of the studies have been western-oriented or mostly produced and generally validated according to the western or rather the American standards. Others (Hofstede 1980; Laurent (1986; Jackson 1995; Alpander and Carter 1995 and Evans et a1.l995) seem to agree that the implementation of management development activities or the evaluation of existing activities, in different cultures must be undertaken with an understanding of the underlying traditions and values of that culture. The failure to take national differences between countries into account has been the cause of many business failures (Ricks, 1993). As a result, there is a dearth of research in cross-cultural communication, management and marketing in the Arab world in general, and the U.A.E in particular and there are areas that have not been covered by the scholars at all. Therefore, this study assesses client-contractor relationships. It also intends to investigate the issues of cross-cultural management in the construction industry. A mixed approach (qualitative inquiry and quantitative survey) was carried out in the construction industry. Due to the nature of this research topic and as previous qualitative research carried out in Arab countries (Hill et al, 1998), this one has its challenges. Moreover, as the researcher is a woman from the UAE, she is expected to overcome barriers of research access to construction companies and senior managers, dominated by male gender. The study has made some important contributions. No doubt, it has added to the exiting knowledge culture in business relationships and filling the gap of cross- cultural and communication relationship within one industry. Therefore, a conceptual framework to understand these relationships was developed and tested. Moreover, the study provides very useful information on the national UAE working women.