The ISO 8402 definition of a project (cited by Lockyer and Gordon, 1996 p1), states that it is: 

‘a unique process, consisting of a set of co-ordinated and controlled activities with start and finish dates, undertaken to achieve an objective conforming to specific requirements’.

This is an engineering view reflecting the origins of project management in the manufacturing and construction industries. This perspective, which prevailed until comparatively recently, sees a project as a task-focused entity, proceeding in a linear or similar way from the point of initiation to implementation. However, project management is now increasingly recognised as a key generic skill for business management (Fangel 1993), with “management by projects” emerging as general mode of organizing for all forms of enterprise (Turner 2003). This change has added further impetus to the study of the human aspects of projects by academics and practitioners (Sotiriou and Wittimer 2001 ; Zimmerer and Yasin 1998).

In parallel with this development, work has been done to clarify what is meant by the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of an IS project (Thompsett 1995 ; Wateridge 1998) and to identify appropriate evaluative criteria. Most writers, for example Schwalbe (2002), Tukel and Rom (2001) and Wright (1997), promote the importance of on-time delivery, within budget and to an expected standard of quality but Hartman and Ashrafi (2002) extend this list to ten measures of project success. One conceptual problem underpinning these differences is the need for a clear separation of factors contributing to successful project and those for the successful management of the project.

The latter forms part of the total project and though intertwined; each domain has different stakeholders, time frames, objectives and outcomes (Atkinson 1999 ; Geddes 1990 ; Munns and Bjeirmi 1996 ; Shenhar, Levy and Dvir 1997).

Figure One presents an open system view of a project. The frame represents the context of the project and within this boundary there are two evaluative dimensions. The horizontal perspective concerns the transformation of business inputs to outputs i.e. benefits (Ward, Taylor and Bond 1996) and is not the subject of this paper. The vertical dimension is the focus of the present study, which aims to explore the way leadership affects the project process. It takes as its thesis, a socio-political ideal that the successful conduct of a project depends upon how well the project addresses the constraints (as political forces) by mobilising counter-forces in the form of resources. These may include the operation of appropriate task mechanisms (processes), use of finance, the deployment of development technologies (platforms) but these mean little without the fourth, most vital element - people.

Figure 1: The Evaluative Domains of an IS Project (after Maylor 1996)

There have been many studies of business executives but far fewer investigations of project leaders. Although the importance to an IS project of a good (or poor) leader may appear to be intuitively obvious, there is disagreement between authorities about whether, in fact, this assumption is totally valid.

Smith (1999) and Thite (2000) argue that there is strong evidence that a project may fail through lack of leadership and that these problems are endemic to all types of project, not just those concerned with information systems (Frame 1994 ; Jiang 2001). This conclusion is contested by other research, which suggest that leadership is not a particularly important success factor for project success (Cooke-Davis 2002 ; The Standish Report 1995). Perhaps, these diametrically opposed positions stem (in part) from the difficulty of elucidating exactly what ‘leadership’ means because the word is so value-laden, reflecting the observer’s view of a leader in action. As Bennis and Nanus (1985 p 23) wryly observe:

“Like love, leadership continued to be something everyone knew existed but nobody could define.”

Leadership may be constructed as a state of mind, a process, a skill or a function: it can appear to be all these things and more. However, the common factor for the different conceptualisations is the requirement for there to be a leader and a set of activities performed by the leader, which creates and maintains a link to individuals, who are the followers of the leader (Buhler 1993). Accordingly, the understanding that has been chosen as the paradigm for the present research, is that leadership is conceived as:

“a relationship through which one person influences the behaviour or actions of other people” (Mullins, 1999, p253).

A second issue to obscure the nature of leadership has been the debate surrounding the differences between managers and leaders (Kotter 1990 ; Sadler 1997 ; Zalenik 1992). In practice, the terms are often used interchangeably, since the nature of projects always requires both ways of working (Hickman 1992). The term ‘managerial leadership’ (Robinson 1999) incorporates both the technical task-orientated and people-focused elements of the IS project leader’s job and is consistent with the generic bilateral structure of managerial roles proposed by Mintzberg (1992). The effects of this duality resonate throughout this study of leadership.

2          Leadership theories.

Adair (2002 p59) states: “that the Anglo-Saxon root of the words lead and leadership is ‘laed’, which means a path or road.” The nature of leadership as a form of path-finding was first examined by Socrates and later explored by Hegel and Carlyle but the first complete perspective on leadership was the Trait approach (Taffinder 1995). This theory sought to identify personal attributes of leaders and how these differed from followers (Chemers, 1997 ; Northhouse 1997). A study of traits conducted by Edgemon (1995) was focused upon IS/IT projects and looked at the effectiveness of technical teams. The investigation concluded that successful IS project leaders were adept at problem solving, giving of trust, recognising achievement and coping with stress. However, there are problems with associating personality types with real-life examples of successful leaders or providing a satisfactory explanation for the non-emergence of leaders (Kirkpatrick and Locke 1991; Steyrer 1998). Consequently, attention moved to leadership style theories (Mintzberg 1998; Tannenbaum and Schmidt 1973).

A development of style theory that recognised the context for the exercise of leadership led to the emergence of a third perspective – contingency or situational theories. These models consider leadership as an exercise in socio-political influence (Griffin 1999) by which some leaders are successful in particular circumstances but not in others. These circumstances, or situations, are the intervening or contingent conditions for the exercise of leadership (Toveda 1994). By combining some of the ideas of traits and style theory, situation models can be used to analyse adaptive behaviours within a changing environment. This is what is often found within IS/IT projects. These are characterised by intensive team-working, where individuals may be geographically dispersed and have only a part-time commitment and may not be ready to participate (Buttrick 1997). In this context, situational theory gives a good insight into the exercise of leadership, because it is predicated upon the socio-political dynamics of interdependence (Kelly and Thabaut 1978) by recognising the importance of interpersonal communications within the team. 

A variant of situational theory created by Hersey and Blanchard (1993) develops this idea by placing the relationship of the leader and followers (the team) at the locus of a model. Cartwright and Zander (1968) explain this bond is a form of contract. The leader attempts to satisfy both the goals of the group and the individual. The followers ‘reward’ the leader for this contract, by donating commitment, trust and ceding power-based status to the leader.  However, not all theorists, for example, Cooksey (2003), are fully convinced by leader-follower paradigm, expressing strong doubts about its general validity and universality.

3          Empirical research.

The aim of the research was to find possible linkages between behaviour of IS project leaders, team members' experiences of those behaviours and project lifecycle/process management outcomes. The Hersey-Blanchard (HB) model has been operationalised (Cairns et al. 1998) in a form of an instrument for evaluating different styles of leadership. These principles were used to investigate project leadership within the IS development department of a financial outsourcing company that manages investment portfolios for national and international clients.

At the case study site a sample of project teams and projects was purposefully selected using two criteria:

1.         Informants had participated from start to finish within a particular project.

2.         These projects were completed between December 2001 and January 2003.

The research sample reflected the project leader- team structure. Firstly, project leaders were approached to acquire evidence about the project leader's dominant leadership style. The data was collected using the instrument mentioned above. This consists of a questionnaire with twelve questions, each with four possible answers, carrying a score of either –2, -1, +1 or +2.

A scale from negative twenty-four to positive twenty-four was used to represent the adaptability of the project leader. The leadership style was measured along four dimensions: High Task-Low Relationship; High Task-High Relationship; High Relationship-Low task and Low Task-Low Relationship. Before distribution to the informants, the questionnaire was piloted to establish its appropriateness for an IS project. Although no significant changes were needed to the instrument its design was altered slightly to include demographic details about the leader, such as gender, age, management/leadership training received and length of service at the company.

A second sample group represented members of the project team, the leaders of which, were the subjects of the study. Here data was used for identifying differences between the leadership style as determined by Hersey and Blanchard's model and the perceptions of team members, as the ‘followers’ of that leader. Due to time limitations and problems of access, only one person was randomly chosen as a representative of each team. Where a member declined to take part, a second person was selected from the team, again randomly.

Lastly, project time, cost and quality data was collected from internal reports about each of the projects managed by the participating project leaders. This data detailed time, costs variances and also problems associated with the system during the first two months of ‘live’ operation. The latter was interpreted as indicative of the quality of the project management process.

3.1       Data analysis method.

The project leaders were ranked in order of his or her score of overall adaptability, as assessed by the HB instrument. Then each project was analysed for:

(i)         variance to scheduled elapse time

(ii)        variance to monetary budget

(iii)       operational system quality

A spreadsheet was created with the leaders sorted in descending HB score order and with the project rankings listed in another three columns. A software package (SPSS) was used to calculate the bivariate correlation of adaptability versus each of the project management process outcomes stated above. Spearman’s correlation co-efficient was chosen for this because of the ordinal nature of the variables and its ability to provide information about relationships in a wide range of circumstances.

3.2       The project sample.

The sampling criteria identified fifteen IS project cases. The characteristics of the sample have been compared below with the results of a national survey of nearly six hundred IS project managers and projects undertaken by Sauer and Cuthbertson (2003).

3.2.1   Time: predicted completion date versus actual completion date.

The duration of the selected projects ranged from six weeks to a year, with an average of five months. Although the average time variance was three weeks late, four projects exceeded the scheduled time scale by more than ten percent. The national survey showed that approximately one third of projects took less than six months; one third took between six months to one year, and the balance took from one to five years. Therefore, the sample projects were of a shorter duration than the norm but nevertheless can be considered representative of shorter term projects.

3.2.2   Cost: budgeted cost of the project versus actual cost of the project.

The cost of the sample projects ranged between £25,000 to £1.5 million, with an average of £400,000 cost and an average positive variance of around £28,000 (seven percent). These figures are comparable to the results in the national sample. Two projects were completed under budget, and two projects exceeded their budget by more than fifteen percent. It was not possible to examine the correlation between cost and duration because project costs included other non-payroll items, such as expenditure on hardware and software used to support the development of the application.

3.2.3   Quality: number of support calls with in the first two months of live operation.

Over a two-month period the average number of calls made to the help desk was fifteen and with a range from three to fifty-five. Six projects received fewer than ten calls and three projects received more than twenty calls. Although the highest incidence of calls was associated with the most complex and expensive system implemented within the sample period, there was no general correlation between project duration, cost and number of calls. No comparative statistics about quality were available from the large-scale survey referred to above.

The conclusion was reached that the sample was representative of the IS UK project experience and could be used for the study.

3.3       IS project leaders.

Fifteen IS development project leaders (ten males and five females) met the sampling requirements and agreed to take part in the research. The average age of the participants was thirty-eight years and the average length of service was four years. However, two of the project leaders had worked for the company for over ten years. These characteristics may be compared to the national survey average of forty-one years of age and current employment of seven years. Therefore the study sample included project leaders that were younger and probably less experienced than the norm.

The mean adaptability score for the fifteen project leaders was six out of twenty four maximum (Figure Two). The highest adaptability score was positive twenty-one and the lowest minus six. The dominant style was High Task - High Relationship. The least popular leadership style was the Low Task -Low Relationship, which included one leader. Only three of the participants recorded similar scores across all quadrants: the optimal adaptability profile.

Figure 2: Distribution of Project Leadership Styles.

3.4       IS Project Teams.

The evidence from the team member questionnaires supported the idea that the leadership style affected outcomes for eight projects, six of which had a positive affect and two with negative influence. In another two projects the evidence was contradictory. One team member said the leadership style positively effected the time-scale, but had a negative affect on the budget. For another project it was the opposite case: the individual felt that the leadership style impacted negatively upon the schedule of the project, which was completed late, but positively affected the cost of the project, which was completed to the budget.

In the remaining five projects, the team members felt that the leadership had no effect on the outcome of the project. Interestingly, all these projects were late and over budget. 

Out of the six projects that were on or under budget, analysis of team opinions indicated that leadership had affected the conduct of the project. Ten team members felt that quality was not affected by the style of leadership.  The opinion of the five other team members was that leadership had a positive affect on quality of the final deliverables.

Figure 3: Project Leaders and Project Outcomes.

4          Analysis of results.

4.1       Project leader adaptability.

The results did not suggest a correlation between leader’s age and his/her adaptability, nor between the gender of the leader and adaptability. The failure to link leadership to gender (in a given project situation) is consistent with a previous study conducted by Cartwright and Gale (1995). However, the data shows a weak correlation between experience and adaptability of the project leader (at the ten-percent level). This result may be taken as a tentative confirmation of the common sense view that experience allows a repertoire of styles to be developed as the leader matures. This facility seems to have little to do with formal project management training. Those that were trained in project planning and control techniques were not necessarily the most adaptable. Further work is needed to explore whether or not current training practices are producing good managers but poor leaders of IS projects!

4.2             Achievement of project management goals.

4.2.1   Meeting time and cost objectives.

A linkage between all the project leaders and the corresponding IS development projects was identified but this was not statistically significant. However, when the one extreme result where the project with the worst outcome and the corresponding project leader was removed from the data set, the results showed significance (at the five-percent level). Thus the evidence from this limited study is that the attainment of cost and time goals is linked to the extent to which an individual is able to modify her or his approach to team leadership.

For the case study organisation, the favourite mode of project leadership was that of High Task - High Relationship focus. This result can be interpreted to suggest that in the main, project teams have the intrinsic morale and motivation to do well but possibly feel that they lack the knowledge, skills and political backing (resources) to meet the objectives of the project.  The next most popular mode was the converse style  – that is, Low Task - High Relationship orientation. This occurs when the team perceives it is capable to do the job but lacks the commitment to the project or confidence about the project situation. There were far fewer instances where the optimum condition applies (team are both able and willing) or where a project had totally unmotivated and insecure staff. Given these conclusions the following propositions are put forward for confirmation or rejection through further research:

§          P1: Leadership style adaptability can influence the chances of success, if the project is not behind schedule and/or over-budget.

§          P2: Leadership style adaptability cannot influence the chances of success, if the project is behind schedule and/or over-budget.

4.2.2   Meeting quality standards.

The study was not able to demonstrate linkage of leadership with system quality. Perhaps this result is not surprising, because the invisibility of software deliverables makes this element of an IS project difficult to measure in meaningful ways (Affoumado 1998). At the study site complete records were kept of project time and costs, but there was no comparative base of knowledge about the quality of project deliverables. Indeed, the measurement of quality varied widely in form and content: the exigencies of each project dictating what system components were quality-assured and reworked. To address this problem with quality-in-development, the study attempted to use quality-in-operation as the evaluative approach, using the number of support calls as a surrogate for project process quality. This approach was a failure for several reasons. Firstly, it conflated the project success measures of outcomes with that of management process.  That is, in terms of Figure One, it confused the horizontal and vertical perspectives. The second reason is that operational system quality is an amalgam of technical elements (functional quality) and how it is delivered to the users (service quality) (Whyte and Bytheway 1996). To compound this problem, faults sometimes emerge months after an apparently successful implementation. The measurement period was probably too short to properly assess the affects of process management on quality.

Figure 4: Project Situations, Styles and Leadership Roles.

5          A situational model of IS project leadership.

The case study data allows the different leader-follower modes to be mapped to the situations for each project at the case study site. The sample set of fifteen projects have been divided into groups that reflect the balance between control of resources and control of constraints, thus reflecting the project leaders ability to manage risks to the project (Jiang 2000). The results of the adaptability study can be developed into a simple framework (Figure Four) that positions different leadership roles, depending upon circumstances and context of the project (Tjosvold and Wong 2000). Each quadrant has been labelled with a name reflecting the adaptive role suggested for the leader in a particular project situation. The figures shown in brackets are the number of projects (in the sample of fifteen) that were judged fit a particular situation (I – IV) at the point in time the leader-follower questionnaire was completed. The figure also shows how the suggested categories correspond to the quadrants in the HB model. The dimensions of the latter are drawn in grey and the quadrant number (Figure Two) positioned in grey ovals.

§          Project Situation I – Leader as Team Supporter.

This is ideal situation for a project, so the role of the leader is to encourage continued self-management by the team through delegation by the leader to the team of virtually all of his or her task-related powers. The idea is that in situations where the leader has high control of constraints and resources, maintaining stability and harmony within the leader-team relationship could be achieved through the provision of a good working atmosphere.

This may be done through enhancement of team social interactions and by removing irritating elements in the working set up, including the physical environment and unnecessary bureaucracy.

§          Project Situation II – Leader as Team Coach.

When there are severe time constraints upon the project, the temptation is to cut corners but an adaptive IS project leader does the opposite. Not only by enforcing working standards or policies, but also by organising the work in such a way that tasks can be performed more quickly. The leader helps task management by regularly summarising for the team the project situation, clarifying direction, rapid adjudication of disagreements, through development of collaborative teamwork and tactics for completing development activities and by closely directing work to meet project goals.

§          Project Situation III – Leader as Team Therapist.

Where constraints e.g. the schedule for the project, are perceived to be tolerable, relationships should be tuned through development of confidence and resilience. The sharing of a common vision and facilitating ways to improve personal performance helps to bring a focus to this role. Team members have to be persuaded by the leader that a good result is achievable, even though resources are limited. The leader should adopt a role that includes the massaging of egos (bruised or otherwise) so as to prepare individuals for the project ‘game’ ahead.

§          Project Situation IV – Leader as Team Captain.

This situation was observed in only one project within the sample. This was the most difficult set of circumstances encountered. The functionality of the product (which was a web-based financial derivatives trading system) expanded beyond reason but the business client was adamant about keeping to the original implementation date. Furthermore, it was not easy to add further developers and other specialists to the international team.

Recovery from a crisis situation represents a singular opportunity for a heroic leader but the ‘captains’ role is really that of the iconoclast who takes power to break the established barriers in the form of corporate and project-specific rules and protocols. The actions need to be symbolic and practical. For example, enabling the direct communication of junior team members with senior figures in the client hierarchy, arranging the team to work in shifts, acquiring temporary administrative support, negotiating extra non-monetary rewards and/or cash bonuses and by fragmenting the project plan into a weekly delivery of products. In this role, the project leader has to be everywhere, doing tasks, directing others and maintaining morale through the creation of clear and realistic project expectations. However, this frenetic pace cannot be maintained for long and it is not a desirable style for most projects.

6          Leadership and IS project success – Some conclusions.

Leadership or, more realistically, the lack thereof, is found in everyday life and all types of business activity. However, because of their intensive nature, IS projects, in particular, present an especially good laboratory for seeing the affects of leadership with a clarity and immediacy that is often missing from other environments.

6.1       Implications for theory.

A limitation to this research is that the focus is on the leader and critics may point to the potential danger of over-emphasising the importance of the leadership to success, with the consequent neglect of other key factors. That is, an individual may be important but is he or she that important? Perhaps a more realistic model is joint leadership, constituted from the shared behaviours of the project manager and all other members of the team. If this philosophy is accepted, further research would help to understand how the general ‘character’ of the team also adapts to reflect changing project contingencies (Kloppenborg and Petrick 1999).

A second issue is that the present study investigated information systems development but IS activities incorporate a variety of jobs: development teams might be a special case. For example, Park and Harris (2000) found several team types commonly associated with research and knowledge-intensive work. Applying these ideas to IS/IT work-groups would mean there are three other forms that might be investigated, other than IS (self-managed) project teams:

§          Intensive problem solving – IS/IT technical specialists such as 2nd/3rd line support

§          Heterogeneous cross-functional - mixed business and IS Joint Application Development (JAD) or Rapid Application Development (RAD) groups

§          Highly directed - call centre/operational first line or help desk teams.

Each type will have different objectives and ideals, implemented in a range of structural configurations, communications channels, external discretionary power and patterns of internal influence. More work is needed to see if the findings concerning style adaptability are also true for these forms of IS/IT team.

This exploratory study is supportive of situational style as an intuitively reasonable perspective for understanding IS project leadership. Although it was developed over three decades ago, the Hershey-Blanchard instrument is a practical tool for evaluating adaptability. However, the evidence from the case study indicates that a more complete understanding project leadership would be developed thorough the addition of another role dimension, the Cultural-Leader one (Hare 2003).

Table 1: Extension to the Hershey-Blanchard Instrument.

If the Hershey-Blanchard instrument were developed to incorporate a third dimension corresponding, to Hare’s Cultural-Leader role (Table One), then the instrument would then be able to evaluate the three macro factors of managerial leadership, transactional transformational and situational, suggested by Flanagan and Thompson (1993). Adaptability scores would not be mapped to a quadrant (Figure Four) but rather to a location within a cube enabling some further alignments to be made with the situated styles of executive leaders identified by Goleman (2000).

The third area where more research is needed is the assessment of leadership influence upon the attainment of project quality targets. If this were accomplished, it may then be possible to establish the HB instrument as an integrated approach for evaluating the social and process-related aspects of project management. There is likely to a linkage here between the former, which is constituted from trust, commitment and efficacy, and the latter that can be measured by time, cost and quality. Some interesting research could be carried out to see if these two ‘iron triangles’ are fully congruent or not.

6.2       Lessons for practice.

The most important ingredient defining the relationship between people in an IT project group is the nature and frequency of knowledge-based and affective interactions. The adaptive project leader is one who can dynamically and intuitively reconfigure the communications structures depending upon the exigencies of the IT project to meet speed, quality, stakeholder satisfaction etc. In the context of seeking adaptable individuals, there are two circumstances where the HB instrument might be employed, to improve organisational activities that Proehl (1996 p. 9) suggests are often done in ‘haphazard ways.’ Firstly, to help with the selection of individuals to lead IS projects. Candidates with a high adaptability will likely be more successful than those with a low adaptability score. The second use would be for assessing the affect of training upon the project leader. However, this presupposes that leaders can be trained (Wateridge 1997) and perhaps a more appropriate application, is for evaluating the success of more tailored forms of personal development, such as job rotation and mentoring. 

Finally, although an IS project may be viewed as an open system, it is a metastable environment that can rapidly and sometimes catastrophically tip from state to another. In this context, a successful IS project leader is a person who, based on the changes to the project situation, can dynamically reshape his or her role to get the best from all members of the team.

7          Acknowledgement

The authors would like express thanks to Michael Byrne for undertaking the survey work and completing the statistical analysis.

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