Authentic leadership for 21st century project delivery

Distributed Leadership in Projects: The Contributions of Stakeholders

This article examines how stakeholders contribute to leading a project. Using a longitudinal study of a project embedded in a public project portfolio, the article uncovers a leadership configuration in which project portfolio and project actors come together in four patterns: top-down influence, transactional exchange, pooled leadership, and co-leadership. This configuration reveals integrated leadership units, the possibility of senior managers to both constrain and channel project manager contributions, and a wider variety of leadership patterns in horizontal and vertical relationships. These insights offer a more comprehensive account of distributed leadership that contributes to the development of leadership capacity in projects.

How a Despotic Project Manager Jeopardizes Project Success: The Role of Project Team Members’ Emotional Exhaustion and Emotional Intelligence

Drawing on conservation of resources theory, our study investigates whether a project manager’s despotic leadership style influences project success directly and indirectly through the underlying mechanism of project team members’ emotional exhaustion. Additionally, the moderating role of project team members’ emotional intelligence (EI) between despotic leadership and emotional exhaustion is also examined. Data were collected from the project-based employees working in telecommunications organizations (n = 250) using a time-lagged survey in three waves. The result indicates that despotic leadership has a significant negative influence on project success, and emotional exhaustion partially mediates this relationship. Moreover, conforming to a rare line of inquiry that there is a dark side to being emotionally intelligent, our findings show that the effect of despotic leadership style on emotional exhaustion is stronger when a project team member is highly emotionally intelligent. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

Enhancing project team outcomes despite provisional work: a discussion to leverage cross-generational advantages

Purpose

This paper seeks to enhance team performance by intersecting two existing literature streams, generational influences and working teams. This paper aims to boost project objective achievement through the instrumental use of generational competencies despite temporary and provisional project team environments. This supports project team leaders in harnessing diverse generational competencies of contributors to maximize outcomes.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors adopt the simultaneous use of social categorization and information processing to connect these diverse literature streams, highlighting the value system and skills of each generation to maximize working benefits.

Findings

Project team leader’s tactical deployment of generational competencies may positively contribute to execution and increased goal achievement. The increasingly provisional nature of workforce teams magnifies the need for intentional team management. Embracing generational competencies may elevate team members, increase productivity and decrease turnover.

Practical implications

This paper offers a pathway to couple team execution and generational differences by identifying generational traits which may benefit execution-focused, but provisional teams.

Social implications

Rather than managing team members to fit into a specific work process, this paper explores the benefits associated with team leader acceptance and strategic use of diverse generational behaviours.

Originality/value

The authors expand upon team diversity by intersecting execution-based and provisional project teams with the intentional use of generational influences to build trust and further positive outcomes.

Mediating Role of Switch Leadership Between Dynamic Work Environment and Project Success

There is a limited research on the mediating role of the switch leadership style between the working environment and project success. Therefore, this study aims to examine the mediating role of switch leadership between the dynamic working environment and project success. This study adopted an online survey instrument to collect cross-sectional data from 160 project managers and team members of telecommunications companies in Pakistan. The path mediation analysis revealed partial mediation of switch leadership between the dynamic working environment and project success, Finding suggests that the Pakistani telecommunications sector is susceptible to changes in leadership styles, and the chances of project being successful could be greatly improved if the switch style of leadership is adopted by project managers. Moreover, researchers need to continue identifying different leadership styles and practitioners need to adopt different switch leadership styles not only to increase the chances of project success but also to counter the impacts of complexities found in IT projects.

Shared leadership, value and risks in large scale transport projects: Re-calibrating procurement policy for post COVID-19

Before the 2019 Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) outbreak, the Australian Commonwealth and State Governments invested significantly in the upgrade and construction of large-scale transport infrastructure projects (>AU$500 million). However, two trends prevail in Australia. Concessionaires/contractors face a requirement for fixed-price contracts, high levels of risk, and low margins. Concomitantly, an increasing number of projects have experienced significant cost blowouts, with adverse impacts on both the public and private sectors. Calls for the public sector to engage with collaborative procurement approaches to deliver large-scale transport projects, however, have gone unheeded. In this paper, we critically review existing policies and practices used to procure large-scale transport projects and examine the challenges they pose in a post-COVID-19 world. We suggest that the public and private sectors need to work in unison to overcome the significant economic hurdles that COVID-19 presents to the nation's infrastructure demands. We then proffer that governments need to re-calibrate their procurement policies to future-proof their large-scale transport infrastructure projects. To facilitate the process of re-calibration, we develop a theoretical procurement framework for consideration based on the concepts of shared leadership, value creation, and risks. It is envisaged that our procurement framework will provide a platform for engendering economic value and accounting for all-important societal costs and benefits in a world post pandemic.

A Strategic Framework for Transformational Leadership Development in Megaprojects

Project managers’ leadership has a direct and an indirect effect on project success. Extant literature has established that transformational leadership style positively affects project success in a major way. The main aim of this research is to understand the variables that positively affects transformational leadership development and their interrelationships in megaprojects. The Total Interpretive Structural Model (TISM) methodology is adopted to propose a framework, and Impact Matrix Cross-Reference Multiplication Applied to a Classification (MICMAC) approach is used to examine the strategic nature of the enablers. The research shows that there exists a group of enablers having a high driving power and low dependence, requiring maximum attention and of strategic importance, while another group consists of those variables that have high dependence and are resultant actions. Furthermore, the model explains the relationships among each pair of variables. Organisations dealing in megaprojects would be the major beneficiaries of this study. Policy makers in these organisations would explicitly understand the variables and their interrelationships that needs attention for transformational leadership development. This would help them to prioritize their efforts and implement suitable strategies to focus on the most important variables for developing transformational leaders ultimately leading to project success.

Governing Collaborative Project Delivery as a Common-Pool Resource Scenario

When collaborative project delivery models such as integrated project delivery (IPD) combine project resources, share decision-making rights, and distribute risk-and-reward among participants, the project can be conceptualized as a common-pool resource scenario. Multiple project appropriators have contractual rights to withdraw units from the shared resource system (i.e., the project budget). This theorization suggests project managers avoid the tragedy of the project by crafting effective self-governance structures in the face of pluralism. Using IPD as an example, this article suggests these project governance structures reflect Ostrom’s design principles for the successful governance of long-enduring common-pool resource scenarios.

Leadership in Dental Practice: a Three Stage Systematic Review and Narrative Synthesis

OBJECTIVES

To review leadership for dentists in patient facing, primary care dental practice.

METHODS

A three stage systematic review with narrative synthesis included stage 1: a scoping overview of management and leadership policy context; stage 2: systematic review of review of leadership in healthcare; and stage 3: systematic focused review of leadership in patient-facing dental practice.

RESULTS

The healthcare literature mirrors the generic literature in relation to the temporal evolution of leadership theories. Policy papers influence healthcare literature, though these are generally written by independent bodies, link solely to medical publications, and are often commissioned from the grand strategic level thereby grounding them in a politicised system. The healthcare leadership literature offers few studies at the operational (patient care) level of leadership, with none of these focused explicitly on dentistry and dental practice. Numerous aims, definitions, models, conceptualisations, and links to theories of leadership are reported. The stage 1 literature demonstrates more contemporaneous ideas of leadership, while the dental practice literature is too often grounded in outdated concepts and theories.

CONCLUSIONS

The overarching trend is from leaders to leadership; with no unified definition, model, theory, concept nor aim recognised. The fundamental importance of specific context and the reaction of others to leadership is reinforced. Leadership theories aligned to healthcare include Engaging, Authentic, Collective and the Transformational-Transactional continuum. Leadership is a dynamic, socially constructed process, only occurring in a group setting. Consisting of multiple moderating variables that demonstrate reciprocal influence on one another, these influences are neither equal nor stable. (246 words) CLINICAL SIGNIFICANCE: Leadership is embedded in regulatory guidance and standards relating to general dental practice. It is therefore crucial to have an evidenced based understanding of what leadership means in this context, and what further work is necessary to support clinicians in the leadership domain.

Servant leadership: a new perspective to explore project leadership and team effectiveness

Purpose

Servant leadership is a new follower-centric style of leadership. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the project leaders’ servant leadership style on project team effectiveness via team goal clarity and team process clarity within the project-based organizational context.

Design/methodology/approach

A total of 58 teams working in 3 project-based organizations participated in the survey study. Team members rated their project leaders’ servant leadership style, team goal clarity and team process clarity in the project, while leaders evaluated team effectiveness. Hypotheses were tested using multi-level structural equation modeling.

Findings

Results suggested that servant leadership had a positive and significant impact on project team effectiveness via team goal clarity and team process clarity.

Originality/value

The study examined the influence of servant leadership as a team leadership approach within a project context. As a multi-level design, the study also identified the team-specific mechanisms (team goal clarity and team process clarity), which could help accomplish team effectiveness.

Leading Through Innovation Project Setbacks: How Authentic Leaders Keep Their Innovators Resilient

The failure rate of innovation projects is substantial. Even innovation projects that fare well are sometimes terminated before completion. However, given the importance of innovator passion and commitment to innovative endeavors for successful innovation, such terminations pose the clear and present danger of negatively affecting subsequent innovation projects. Therefore, it is a key leadership task in the innovation arena to maintain innovator passion for their endeavors despite such setbacks. Our research indicates that authentic leadership is likely to bolster innovator resilience potential in order to minimize the human cost of innovation project terminations.

Lessons from a Successful Data Warehousing Project Management

This article provides an overview of project management aspects of a data warehouse application implementation. More specifically, the article discusses the project's implementation, challenges faced, and lessons learned. The project was initiated with an objective to redesign the procurement data pipeline of a data warehouse. The data flows from enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to enterprise data warehouse (EDW) to reporting environments. This project was challenged to deliver more quickly to the consumers with improved report performance, and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) in EDW and data latency. Strategies of this project include providing continuous business value, and adopt new technologies in data extraction, transformation and loading. The project's strategy was also to implement it using some of the agile principles. The project team accomplished twice the scope of previous project in the same duration with a relatively smaller team. It also achieved improved quality of the products, and increased customer satisfaction by improving the reports' response time for management.

Managing stakeholders through alliances: a case study of a megaproject in New Zealand

Delivering a road infrastructure megaproject is complex and requires engagement with multiple stakeholders. Stakeholder engagement is an essential part of the management process, particularly in megaprojects, helping to manage what can be complex stakeholder relationships. The alliance procurement approach has been acknowledged as a platform that can provide a collaborative way of managing such stakeholder complexity. This paper uses a road infrastructure alliance case study in New Zealand to investigate the adopted features embedded in an alliance model in managing stakeholders throughout the interim project alliance agreement phase. The research draws information from stakeholder engagement reports, project documentation, newsletter articles, public engagement reports, transportation agency reports and interviews from the case study. The findings provide valuable insights into how the features of a project alliance (i.e. project governance and commercial model) formulate an effective approach (i.e. building a culture of care, communicating beyond compliance and responsiveness) to the management of multiple stakeholders during the planning and consenting phase. The paper provides a point of reference for construction organisations to help develop a best practice through collaborative contracting for successfully managing stakeholder complexity in future construction megaprojects.

Cost Overruns in Hydrocarbon Megaprojects: A Critical Review and Implications for Research

Cost overruns are prevalent in hydrocarbon (oil and gas) megaprojects. A recent report indicates that 64% of ongoing megaprojects globally are facing cost overruns. Despite their increasing occurrence, there has been limited published research in the mainstream literature that has specifically examined why and how they occur. Consequently, suggestions regarding how to constructively address cost overruns in hydrocarbon megaprojects are scant. To better understand the causal nature of cost overruns in hydrocarbon mega-projects, this article provides a critical review of the extant literature. Findings from the research indicate that complex interactions between project characteristics, people, technology, and structure and culture contribute to cost overruns occurring. As a result, it is suggested that chaos theory can be used to explain how cost overruns arise in hydrocarbon megaprojects. This article provides a reference point for engendering future research in this pervasive and fertile area.

Rallying the Troops or Beating the Horses? How Project-Related Demands Can Lead to Either High-Performance or Abusive Supervision

In today's high-pressure work environment, project managers are often forced to “do more with less.” We argue that this imperative can lead project managers to engage in either high-performance or abusive supervision behaviors. To understand this process, we develop a model and associated propositions linking a project manager's cognitive appraisal of project-related demands to high-performance work practices versus abusive supervision behaviors—both of which impact three project outcomes: stakeholder relationships, people-related project success factors, and employee well-being. We propose that the choice between high-performance work practices and abusive supervision behaviors is moderated by a project manager's personal resources (psychological capital, emotional intelligence, and dark triad personality).