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Managing a Group of Multiple Projects: Do Culture and Leader’s Competencies Matter?

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Abstract

In the literature, team culture has been suggested as one of the factors contributing to the success of a project. In essence, a project manager should create a culture emphasizing teamwork, communication, and knowledge sharing. Such a culture will lead to team effectiveness, which will eventually contribute to the project success. A question arises whether or not this notion is relevant in practices, especially in a multiple-project management setting where one project manager leads multiple, simultaneous projects (a management of a group of multiple projects—MGMP). To answer this question, the main objective of this study is to empirically explore the relevance of team culture in MGMP. The result of this study reveals a surprising finding that team culture does not contribute to the success of a project in MGMP. Other factors provide more significant contribution to project success.

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Notes

  1. While MPM was referred to in this study as a management of multiple projects at a project manager level, other researchers take an organizational views and the term MPM is referred to as portfolio management [11, 12] and the management of multiple projects at a functional level, a.k.a. managing resources across multiple projects [13]. As referred to in this study, MPM is different from program management or portfolio management. Program management is the management of projects which are mutually dependent, share a common goal, and lead to a single deliverable product or service [14]. Portfolio management is the coordinated management of portfolio components to achieve specific organizational objectives [15].

  2. These four cultural traits are similar to four cultural domains (Group culture, Hierarchical culture, Development culture, and Rational culture, respectively) in Competing Value Framework (CVF). Several researchers adopted CVF as a multidimensional framework to assess culture and organizational effectiveness [24, 25].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business, Pennsylvania State University, Erie, PA, USA

    Peerasit Patanakul

  2. School of Technology Management, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, USA

    Zvi H. Aronson

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  1. Peerasit Patanakul
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Correspondence to Peerasit Patanakul.

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Patanakul, P., Aronson, Z.H. Managing a Group of Multiple Projects: Do Culture and Leader’s Competencies Matter?. J Knowl Econ 3, 217–232 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-012-0094-7

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