Cross cultural competencies of Indian Software Expatriates- An Exploratory Investigation

In today’s world of global software teams, managing members from multiple countries and
cultures adds to an already complex mix of software productivity issues. While software team
compositions have been researched based on tasks, personality, and role descriptions, few
models exist to help software project managers reason about software teams with respect to
culture. As more culturally diverse teams develop software products, software project
managers need to manage teams based on cultural factors that will inevitably arise. This
research examines the effect of culture on software project team management, and its impacts
on software productivity, especially as it pertains to requirements engineering tasks. The
main objective is to investigate how individuals from different cultures work together in
software development projects, and to use that understanding to formulate a model for
reasoning about key cultural factors. This research paper focuses on cross cultural
management practices namely cross cultural competency and cross cultural conflict
management practices adopted in software companies of India.