Cross-cultural leadership in the implementation of systems engineering processes: A study of Indonesian expatriate engineers

In projects involving engineers from multiple cultural backgrounds the implementation of Systems Engineering (SE) Processes demands cross-cultural leadership competence by the engineers who lead such work teams to support the quality of project performance. This paper reports the qualitative results of a web-based survey of Indonesian expatriate engineers addressing their perceptions of cross-cultural issues in the implementation of SE processes in projects. The questions investigated the engineers´ knowledge, experience, and perception of how they manage the leadership aspect of their intercultural relationships. Several issues were identified as factors influencing cross-cultural leadership. The factors that influence cross-cultural leadership include conflict resolution and decision making styles used by the project leader. This study reveals that, as perceived by Indonesian engineers, the conflicts that happen in the project team were resolved based on existing policy rather than considering the specific cultural background of participants and the important decisions in the project team were made collaboratively using the leader´s ideas and members´ contributions. Another result from this study is that the relationships between team members were important to the achievement of an effective balance between the completeness and quality of the project. This paper discusses how intercultural issues interact with performance of formally defined project processes.