Navigating cultural tensions and adaptation across changing global IT work environments : a case study of a South African IT unit reorganization

Abstract

Navigating cultural tensions during a reorganization to a globally distributed IT unit is a formidable challenge for IT managers and workers across diverse cultural contexts. Our case study integrates and extends national cultural dimensions and organizational culture models in global IS research with the relational dialectics perspective to explore the discursive and material nature of cultural tensions experienced by local IT unit workers in a multinational technology organization. Drawing from in-depth interviews, we use thematic and contrapuntal analysis to examine the cultural tensions onsite local IT unit managers and specialists from South Africa expressed about their changing relations with an offshore global IT headquarters. Our results reveal an overarching autonomy versus control tension and three interrelated subtensions—workplace flexibility versus workplace standardization, strategic position versus compliant position, and empowerment advocacy versus bureaucratic dictates—which influenced contradictory meanings and responses to the reorganization. These tensions and adaptation strategies, though rooted in the South African IT unit context, resonate with global IT work environments, particularly in emerging economies and high- and low-power-distance cultures like China and Western Europe, where similar dynamics of cultural negotiation between local autonomy and global control are evident. The central contribution of this research is a global IT cultural tensions model, offering practical implications for fostering more inclusive and harmonious IT work environments across diverse cultural and regional contexts.