Cross-cultural collaboration in design engineering - Influence factors and their impact on work performance

Design engineering has become a global business. Accordingly, design engineers are confronted with a need to collaborate with other design engineers, coming from different countries from all parts of the world. So engineers with entirely different cultural backgrounds have to successfully work together in design teams. Some of them succeed better in this task, some worse. An unsolved question is why there are these differences in performing cross-cultural collaboration. This paper presents an approach to determining factors in the backgrounds of design engineers, which influence their way of performing design tasks in cross-cultural collaboration. A qualitative study has been deployed therefore. Study design, conduction and results are presented in this paper.