Culture is the shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs, and affective understanding that are learned

through a process of socialization. These shared patterns identify the members of a culture group while also distinguishing those of another group (Carla). In Organizations, culture forces leaders to acknowledge the impact of their behaviors. If leaders / managers portray an easy going sweet time demeanor, their employees will adopt the same culture. Leaders create, embed, evolve and ultimately manipulate (Schein, 2010, p.3) the culture of an organization, thus really hard to change once entrenched. Culture also helps employees work toward a common vision, and goal. In organization, you find subcultures within departments that align to the overall culture of the organization. Culture is the glue that holds the organization together and drives what happens daily. Culture has different implications on projects. Depending on the culture of the organization, projects may drag on favoring and encouraging creativity i.e. software industries. In an agile organization i.e. cell phone companies, projects will follow strict timelines in need to stay at the forefront. Culture also determines how decisions are made. In some organization, decisions are made from the top and trickle down (hierarchical order) while others have open relationships and can have leaders make decisions at the spar of the moment. Success of the project also gets affected by culture. Some organizational culture will want to have stakeholder approval at every stage while others dont. The French for instance will ensure that the project progresses on a consensual basis wanting to gain agreement from all stakeholders whereas the British will be more inclined to make a decision right or wrong (Roberts, 2008). Management of the project also gets affected by culture. Some organizations will have highly supervised projects while others will have loosely led teams control them. The four acculturation strategies as defined by John Berry, (2001) are integrations, assimilation, separation and marginalization. Integration occurs when a person, or group of individuals move to a place and embrace the culture of the new place without letting go of their individual culture. In a project management view, this is when working on a project that involves members from different organizations that are brought together for the sake of the project. They will tend to continue with their different cultures as well as the new culture at the new organization. Integration tends to allow different members of a project to see multiple perspectives thus being more open minded. It also encourages collaboration between the team members. Individualism will be kept as members are able to choose what is good or bad from a culture to adopt. Integration has its cons as members struggle with keeping their culture and adopting the new one. This could bring about confusion and conflict within the members. Each culture will struggle for dominance as well as some norms getting push back. As a PM, in an integration strategy, members need not feel that one culture is dominant to the other thus reducing conflict. Also instead of pushing back some norms from either culture integrate them thus giving members more options. Assimilation is when an individual or group completely discards his/their own culture for the new culture. Project wise, this is when members of a project from a different organization discard their organizational culture for the new organizations culture. This brings about team work since both are working under the same culture of norms and values. The team will tend to focus more on the project rather than the culture since its the same. Cultural misunderstanding will be reduced i.e. in Kenya, employees tend to distance themselves from their managers as they believe leaders have the final say and one cant give his/her opinion as it might be construed as being rude unlike in America, employee are open to managers and opinions are always welcome. Assimilation may cause limited ability to solve problems as members are all following one culture be it wrong or right. Assimilation my also limit one on expertise as your only using the dominants culture and rejecting yours. PMs in this case have to work with the minority culture to understand the norms of the host culture by encouraging host members to teach their norms and values. Host members can also be encouraged to be accessible in helping thus reducing rejection. Separation is the third strategy defined by Berry. This is where the host culture is rejected for a minority original culture. Project wise, this will enable the minority culture to perfect it products in the

minority original culture. Project wise, this will enable the minority culture to perfect it products in the sense it will continue with its culture. Also it will sustain knowledge as minority culture will continue with its status quo and will not get easily influenced. Separation can also lead to conflict as the host culture will tend to be undermined and rejected. Failure will also increase as no new norms or values will be injected i.e. if for example an American project group works with a Kenyan group and accepts the Kenya culture of keeping ones opinion, then they will tend to not share their expertise as thats what the culture calls for. PM need to work with the majority culture thus to reduce the feeling of rejection for a far less dominant culture. Marginalization is the final strategy. This is where both the host culture and original culture is rejected. This strategy leaves open for a new culture leaving the members fluid to learn a different new culture. This also has no loyalty hindrances by aligning to any of the present cultures. Different members, leaders and their managers will have differing ideas of project progress, and success (Schein, 2010). Marginalized members may feel at times no one understands them (John Kha Lee & Katherine Green) since no set culture exists. This may lead to conflict, less trust and cost maybe very high. This also leads to lack of recognition and/ acceptance between the team members. Performance of the members would be greatly reduced as they learn a new culture different from their original. As PM, this would be a good strategy for the leader and the members since they would be creating a new culture that will be accepted by both groups with no influences from either previous culture.