Does Culture Matter? Cultural Influences and IT Governance Integration Mechanisms

This paper aims to contribute to the conceptualization and contextualization of IT governance (ITG) by exploring the potential influences of national culture on ITG integration mechanisms. We address the lack of understanding towards the influences that culture may have on ITG in previous literature and present a framework to examine whether and how cultural intervention effects ITG performance. Conventional themes in ITG studies pay more attention to the structure of decision-making authorities. This paper focuses on the paradigm of integrative coordination. Through the lens of the resource-based view (RBV), we conceptualize ITG as a systemic set of firm-specific resources in IT value creation; whereas the complementarity of national culture to ITG is conceptualized as a type of country-specific resource. The propositions presented are expected to enrich the understanding of ITG integration mechanisms and IT value creation and benefit the cross-country transfer of ITG concepts and practices.