Leadership in project teams

Introduction

Project teams constitute a very critical component of any contemporary business organization. It is common for a business to engage in projects every now and then and to enlist the participation of specialized project teams. Therefore, a project manager must be ready to contend with a wide range of leadership issues arising from the activities of these teams in order to succeed in attaining the goals outlined in the project.

Although leading project teams is a very challenging undertaking, it can be easily accomplished by simply maintaining strategic focus. This strategy must be conceived with the expectations of all participants and stakeholders in mind. Failure to understand role expectations on the part of a project leader may cause friction thereby leading to project failure. At the same time, the leadership provided to these teams must be based on an in-depth understanding of the entire life of the project. Towards this end, it may be necessary for different project teams to be led in different ways depending on the peculiarity of the tasks that they are handling as well as their position within the project life cycle.

The aim of this report is to investigate three areas of relevance to leaders’ attempts to achieve excellence in inspiring and providing strategic direction to project teams. The first section examines the role of a project leader. The second section explores the position of a project leader in the context of the project life cycle. The last section examines aspects of project execution in terms of the project leader’s ability to address the needs of individual members of the project team.

The role of a project leader

External facilitation: Linking the project to the organization and the public

Leadership can easily determine success or failure of a project. Leading project teams is a very difficult undertaking. The project leader must confront situations where different expectations of his abilities are being expressed openly. This leaves the project leader with a lot of explaining to do regarding what his actual duties and responsibilities are. Such clarification, if provided in the right way, may go a long way in improving overall project outcomes. At the same time, …

References

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Beranek, P. Broder, J. & Reinig, B. (2005). Management of virtual project teams: Guidelines for team leaders. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 16(4), 247-259.

Day, D., Gronn, P. & Salas, E. (2004), Leadership capacity in teams. The Leadership Quarterly, 15(6), 857-880.

DeRue, D. & Ashford, S. (2010). Who will Lead and Who will Follow? A Social Process of Leadership Identity Construction in Organizations. Academy of Management Review, 35(4), 627-647.

Edmondson, A. (2003). Speaking Up in the Operating Room: How Team Leaders Promote Learning in Interdisciplinary Action Teams. Journal of Management Studies, 40(6), 1419-1452.

Hobday, M. (2000), The project-based organization: An ideal form for managing complex products and systems? Research Policy, 29(7), 871-893.

Thamhain, H. (2004). Linkages of project environment to performance: lessons for team leadership. International Journal of Project Management, 22(7), 533-544.

Thompson, G. & Vecchio, R. (2009). Situational leadership theory: A test of three versions. Leadership Quarterly, 20(5), 837-852.

Webber, S. (2002). Leadership and trust facilitating cross-functional team success.  Journal of Management Development, 21(3), 201-214.

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