Project-Based Organizations

Abstract

The preceding chapter gave a general introduction to projectification and project-based organizations. This chapter delves further into these issues and presents more details about the organizational context for the book and the challenges we address. This context is important to us firstly because we argue that there is a need to contextualize HRM and secondly because project-based organizations offer a particularly interesting, challenging, and, at the same time, promising context for the development of human resources. For most people working in a project-based organization, the project is an important work place: an action locality (Grabher, 2004) and a meeting place as much as a producer of emotional energy and job satisfaction. In this chapter, we will discern some of the salient features of the project-based organization, in particular, the kind of project-based organization focused upon in this book. Our intention is to clarify what kind of organization the project-based organization is and to determine the implications of its defining features for the practice and study of HRM.