Exploring the Impact of Customer Organizational Culture on Project Agility in ERP Implementation Projects

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) projects have been the focus of extensive research in recent years. To overcome the challenges associated with these types of projects, one emerging and relatively unexplored stream of research has examined the application of agile project management (APM) in ERP implementation contexts. Despite its growing popularity, APM adoption remains complex, risky, and not yet fully understood. This study focuses on the critical role played by the customer in such projects, as it can either foster or hinder agility. A lack of customer collaboration can often be linked to the customer’s organizational culture (OC). Thus, this study aims to investigate the specific relationship between the customer’s OC and project agility in ERP implementation projects within small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). To conceptualize OC, we adopted the Competing Values Framework (CVF), which distinguishes four cultural types: Clan, adhocracy, hierarchy, and market. Data were collected through an online questionnaire administered to 172 ERP end-users from Canadian SMEs who had participated in their organizations’ ERP implementation projects. The analysis was performed using SmartPLS version 4.1.0.9. The results confirm that customers characterized by a clan, adhocracy, or market culture positively influence project agility, while there was no significant effect of hierarchy culture on project agility. This study addresses several gaps in the literature and offers practical implications. The findings support the idea that vendors should better frame and justify introducing APM in ways that align with each customer’s cultural characteristics within ERP vendor–customer relationships.