Culture and its impact on British construction professionals practicing in the United Arab Emirates

The unique nature of construction means that the cultural dimension is arguably more important for this industry than any other. It is apparent that culture and more importantly, cultural difference, have the potential to be key influences in international construction operations and more than likely, to the success or failure of international construction projects. This paper explores the challenges faced by British construction professionals as a direct result of cultural difference and discovers if overcoming these challenges is a key part to the role they adopt. It transpired that there was an extremely limited source of established research material available on the subject of United Kingdom expatriate construction project managers operating in the United Arab Emirates. This absence of substantial research material necessitated the employment of qualitative research in the form of first hand data derived from project managers that had previously operated or were currently operating in the United Arab Emirates. Research conducted suggests that cultural difference does impact on British project managers; fundamentally, these impacts affected key project management competencies crucial to international effectiveness and this led British project managers to alter their approaches in order to operate effectively. It is apparent that there is a very real shortage of cross-cultural training afforded to British construction project managers. The provision of such knowledge and preparation, even if minimal, for the influential cross-cultural and organizational differences that they can expect to encounter when they are sent to the United Arab Emirates, could assist them with the successful delivery of international projects.