Selection and Empowerment

2021 ◽  
pp. 90-111
Author(s):  
Ralf Müller ◽  
Nathalie Drouin ◽  
Shankar Sankaran

This chapter addresses the selection and empowerment event in balanced leadership; that is, when a team member or a subteam is selected and subsequently authorized to temporarily lead the project. The chapter introduces selection and empowerment concepts, first from a general management and then from a project management literature perspective. Then the chapter drills down to the selection and empowerment practices found in projects. The assessment of these practices leads to five dimensions that make up the empowerment event, which manifests itself in four different empowerment types. Each type is described in terms of the profile of its empowerment dimensions. Together, the empowerment types form a career development framework for future leaders.

2005 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Rodney Turner ◽  
Ralf Müller

The Project Management Institute has commissioned the authors to conduct research into whether the project manager's leadership style is a success factor on projects, and whether its impact is different on different types of projects. In this paper, we review the literature on the topic. Surprisingly, the literature on project success factors does not typically mention the project manager and his or her leadership style or competence as a success factor on projects. This is in direct contrast to the general management literature, which views effective leadership as a critical success factor in the management of organizations, and has shown that an appropriate leadership style can lead to better performance. Since, unlike most literature on project success factors, project management literature does consider the role of the project manager, we also review what it says about his or her leadership style and competence.


Author(s):  
Diletta Colette Invernizzi ◽  
Giorgio Locatelli ◽  
Naomi J. Brookes ◽  
Martin Grey

Project management literature has, until now, mainly focused on new build and only in the last decades the issues of decommissioning (mega) projects has arisen. To respond to this changing environment, project management will need to understand the challenges of decommissioning projects. Decommissioning projects within Oil & Gas, Chemical and Nuclear sectors are characterized by high costs, long schedules and uncertainty-based risks. The budget for Nuclear Decommissioning Projects and Programmes (NDPs) are subject to well publicized increases and, due to their relatively recent emergence, complexity and variety, key stakeholders lack a full understanding of the key factors influencing these increases. Benchmarking involves “comparing actual or planned practices [...] to identify best practices, generate ideas for improvement” [1] and offers significant potential to improve the performance of project selection, planning and delivery. However, even if benchmarking is the envisaged methodology to investigate the NDPs characteristics that impact on the NDPs performance, until now, it has only been partially used and there is a huge gap in the literature concerning benchmarking NDPs. This paper adapts a top-down benchmarking approach to highlight the NDPs characteristics that mostly impact on the NDPs performance. This is exemplified by a systematic quantitative and qualitative cross-comparison of two major “similar-but-different” NDPs: Rocky Flats (US) and Sellafield (UK). Main results concern the understanding of the alternatives of the owner and/or the contractors in relation to (1) the physical characteristics and the end state of the nuclear site, (2) the governance, funding & contracting schemes, and (3) the stakeholders’ engagement.


2002 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 48-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willy Herroelen ◽  
Roel Leus ◽  
Erik Demeulemeester

Critical chain scheduling/Buffer management (CCS/BM)—the direct application of the theory of constraints (TOC) to project management—has received much attention in project management literature. There still is controversy over the merits and pitfalls of the CCS/BM methodology. This paper focuses on the fundamental elements of CCS/BM logic and pinpoints some intricacies that are not commonly referred to in the available literature. The authors’ analysis is based on a critical review of the relevant sources and experimentation with both commercial CCS/BM software and an internally developed CCS/BM-based tool.


Author(s):  
S. Tappura ◽  
J. Kivistö-Rahnasto

Introduction: Assessing and developing managers’ safety competence is one method for achieving high safety performance in the organisations. Objectives: The aim of this study is to construct a safety management competence development framework to help organisations in safety promotion. Materials and methods: This study comprises a theory-based construction of the safety management competence development framework and   an empirical study in a case organisation. Results: The framework consists of definition of safety management competence requirements, self-assessment of the competence, definition of development needs, and implementation of competence development activities. Conclusions: The framework provides the means for systematically improving managers’ safety management competence as an integral part of general management competence development procedures in organisations.


2016 ◽  
pp. 1654-1673
Author(s):  
Yang Fan ◽  
Michael Thomas ◽  
Yishi Wang

Critical to project success and job satisfaction of project managers is effective Human Resource Management (HRM). The temporary nature of projects has changed the traditional career paths for project managers and the way project-oriented companies prioritize their motivation tactics. By conducting a survey to explore a general pattern of employers' HRM practices in different industries regarding the project management career, this paper presents the fact that most employers prefer on-job training to organizational career path in motivating and retaining project manager and that there is no difference between IT industry and other industries in terms of the extent of use of on-job training and the organizational career path. These findings contribute to an in-depth understanding of the project management career path and suggest that project managers be proactive in adjusting to change in the workplace by being more autonomous in their career development decisions based on the larger work environment.


Author(s):  
Cynthia M. LeRouge ◽  
Bengisu Tulu ◽  
Suzanne Wood

This study investigates project initiation for telemedicine, a technology innovation in healthcare organizations that manifests both intra- and inter-organizational collaboration. Moving from a telemedicine project to a sustainable telemedicine service line can be a challenge for many organizations (LeRouge, Tulu, & Forducey, 2010). Project definition (a.k.a., initiation) sets the strategic vision for a project and has been categorized as the most important stage in a project (C. Gray & Larson, 2008) and a key element for project success (Stah-Le Cardinal & Marle, 2006). Although project management best practices have been applied in many domains, there are few studies that link published best practices to the telemedicine domain. This study first presents a model, resulting from a review of project management literature that specifies the recommended components project definition. Using this model as a foundation, the authors explore how project definition is deployed in the telemedicine domain, using the instantiation of telestroke projects for this study. The authors base their findings on a multi-case qualitative data set, with each case representing a distinct telemedicine business model. Findings from this study explicate how the telestroke project initiation process is collaboratively managed and how this process impacts the overall success of the telemedicine programs through the lens of the five distinct telemedicine business models. Specifically, this study contributes insights on key elements of project initiation in the telemedicine context as well as the effects of the varying business models (focusing on commonalities and differences).


Author(s):  
Riaz Ahmed ◽  
Noor Azmi bin Mohamad

Literature reveals a number of confusions within the area of project management regarding the use of terminology and differing interpretations, concerning leadership competencies and leadership styles. In project management literature, many empirical studies have examined the influence of leadership competencies or styles, but yet any substantial review study has rarely been conducted to differentiate between leadership competencies and styles. This study aims to differentiate between leadership competencies and leadership styles in project management literature. This study found that the project manager's leadership terms including competence, competency, competencies, and styles have frequently been used in project management literature. Furthermore, literature has been synthesized to provide more familiarity and understanding on leadership competencies and styles. Findings indicate that leadership competencies and styles are two different things but a few characteristics are common between both the terms. Furthermore, leadership competencies are more suitable for task-oriented activities and leadership styles are more appropriate for relationship-oriented factors. This study has implications for the future directions to identify differences between project manger's average and superior performance through comparison of leadership competencies and styles.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Fernandez-Viagas ◽  
Jose M. Framinan

The amount of resources assigned to a task highly influences its processing time. Traditionally, different functions have been used in the literature in order to map the processing time of the task with the amount of resources assigned to the task. Obviously, this relation depends on several factors such as the type of resource and/or decision problem under study. Although in the literature there are hundreds of papers using these relations in their models or methods, most of them do not justify the motivation for choosing a specific relation over another one. In some cases, even wrong justifications are given and, hence, infeasible or nonappropriated relations have been applied for the different problems, as we will show in this paper. Thus, our paper intends to fill this gap establishing the conditions where each relation can be applied by analysing the relations between the processing time of a task and the amount of resources assigned to that task commonly employed in the production and project management literature.


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