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Int. J. Applied Systemic Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3, 2012
Project-oriented management: dealing with contradictions David Thyssen Dr. Thyssen Management Consultancy Cologne, Heidehofweg 6, 50858 Cologne, Germany E-mail:
[email protected]
Michael Gessler* University Bremen, Institute Technology and Education, Am Fallturm 1, 28359 Bremen, Germany E-mail:
[email protected] *Corresponding author Abstract: More and more modern companies are choosing to organise their work in temporary and permanent forms at the same time. In doing so, they have to face contradictions between different modes of organising. Project management is well established to manage the temporary forms of work, while line management is used to manage permanent forms. This article introduces the concept of project-oriented management as a promising, though ambitious approach for dealing with the inevitable contradictions and dilemmas’ that arise in those organisations using both ways of organising at the same time. We present the findings of an empirical case study that revealed 178 obvious and hidden contradictions between temporary and permanent work inside a projectoriented company. The case study uses the repertory grid technique to uncover the personal constructs – individual images of reality – of line and project managers. Our quantitative and qualitative analysis shows that more than 70% of the contradictions may be explained by two distinctions. Keywords: project management; project-oriented management; contradiction; project-oriented organisation; repertory grid. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Thyssen, D. and Gessler, M. (2012) ‘Project-oriented management: dealing with contradictions’, Int. J. Applied Systemic Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp.206–216. Biographical notes: David Thyssen received his Master in Adult Education and Human Resource Development from the University of Cologne and his PhD in Economic Sciences from the University Bremen. Previously, he was responsible for human resource and organisational development at an IT-company near Cologne. Later, he was for several years the Head of the Project Management Office (PMO) at the same company. Today, he is a freelance Consultant, specialised on the development of project-oriented companies.
Copyright © 2012 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.
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Michael Gessler is Professor at the University Bremen and member of the Executive Board at the Institute Technology and Education. He received his PhD from the Faculty of Philosophy, RWTH Aachen University. Until 2010, he was a member of the executive board at the GPM German Association for Project Management and as well a member of the Council of Delegates at the IPMA International Project Management Association. He is the Editor of the standard handbook Kompetenzbasiertes Projektmanagement (PM3).
1
Introduction
The research programme ‘Innovative Form of Organising’ (INNFORM) has examined more than 450 companies and found that the co-existence of different organising models is the rule and not an exception in ‘modern’ organisations (Pettigrew and Fenton, 2000). These findings underline the assumptions made based on other studies that the usage of new forms of organising supplement existing ones rather than replacing them (Kenis et al., 2009; O’Reilly and Tushman, 2004). A new form of organising which is spreading more and more is project-oriented management. Project-oriented management can be understood as the organisational advancement of classical project management. Some years ago project management was referred to as a structured method for planning, executing and controlling temporary work processes. It was used to solve ‘once in a lifetime’ problems. Nowadays, project management has turned into a strategic concept for organisations as a whole. We call this approach project-oriented management. Project-oriented management is quite a new subject of research and has so far not clearly been separated from the term project management. “So far, organisation design has been under-explored with respect to understanding project organisations and their structures” [van Donk and Molloy, (2008), p.129]. The Scandinavian school of project studies was one of the first to state that modern organisations use temporary and permanent forms of work at the same time (Anell and Wilson, 2002; Sahlin-Andersson and Söderholm, 2002). A reason for that may be that project management research has been viewed from two separate perspectives: “[…] there exist two main theoretical traditions in project management research. The first tradition with intellectual roots in the engineering science and applied mathematics […]. The other tradition with its intellectual roots in the social sciences, such as sociology, organisation theory and psychology, especially interested in the organisational and behavioural aspects of project organisation” [Söderlund, (2004), p.185]. Project management focuses on temporary forms of work. Line management focuses on permanent forms. Project-oriented management, however, considers temporary forms as well as permanent forms of work. It can therefore reach a new level of structural, functional and social complexity (Baecker, 1999, 2007). While managing resources, processes and project portfolios are mainly tasks of the permanent organisation, assuring project success, dealing with risks and managing the quality are tasks of temporary forms of organisation that resolve when the singular task is finished (Figure 1).
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Figure 1
Project-oriented organisations: mixed forms
normative management
project portfolio strategic management
resources financials
methods processes
quality
risk
project program
permanent organisation
operative management execution
temporary organisation
Project-oriented organisations still use organisational logic from the beginning of the 20th century (especially ‘ignoring/tabooing’, ‘sequencing’, ‘segmentation’; Section 4) to address the work problems of the 21st century: it seems that organisational contradictions arise when they try to integrate project-oriented forms of work organisation into line organisations (Bledow et al., 2009; Kenis et al., 2009). Therefore, we formulated the basic hypotheses: using different forms of organising at the same time – especially when they are equally powered – can be a rich source of conflicts.
2
Research design
The following section describes research questions, theoretical framework and the repertory grid analysis as research method. Our basic hypothesis and the observation of project-oriented organisations brought up the following two research questions: 1
Which contradictions exist in project-oriented organisation?
2
How can project-oriented management deal with these arising contradictions?
Before we started the empirical research we faced two challenges. As we wanted to ensure the adaption of our findings in organisational research theory we had to provide a ‘concept of organisation’ that was capable of structuring the expected contradictions. Therefore, we developed a theoretical framework based on the historical evolution of organisational research theory. Secondly, we had to choose a proven method for making obvious and hidden contradictions visible. We found an appropriate one in the repertory grid technique (RGT). The following sections give a short overview of the theoretical framework and the RGT.
2.1 Theoretical framework Based on a historical analysis of organisation theories we developed a framework to systematise organisational contradictions (Table 1). Our model aggregates different understandings of organisations and gives way to a more holistic approach. Organisation theories examined organisations either from an institutional, a functional or an instrumental point of view (Kieser and Walgenbach, 2007). The institutional view focuses on the environment, borders and purposes. The functional view discusses goals,
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division of labour and ways of coordinating work processes. Finally, the instrumental perspective describes organisations by examining rules, structures and organisational roles (Bledow et al., 2009). Table 1
Concept of organisation – based on distinctions Focus
Dimension
Distinctions
Institutional
Environment
Complicated Simple
Boundary
Closed Open
Purpose
Determinate
Goals
Collective
Varying Functional Organisation
Individual Division of labour
Processual Functional
Coordination
Supervised Self-directed
Instrumental
Rules
Limiting
Structures
Hierarchical
Liberating Egalitarian Roles
People-oriented Task-oriented
2.2 Repertory grid technique Even though some contradictions in project-oriented companies may be obvious we expected several contradictions to be hard to verbalise (Grimm, 1999). We used the repertory-grid-technique (Kelly, 1986) to meet these concerns. The RGT is an elaborated research method based on the personal construct theory created by George Armstrong Kelly. It has its founding in subject-oriented therapies but has entered organisational and management research as a further field of application in the last years (Fransella et al., 2004; Rosenberger, 2006). The personal construct theory assumes that individuals construct and realise the surrounding world by making twofold distinctions, so-called dualities (Easterby-Smith et al., 2002). The RGT tries to evoke these individual distinctions and offers a glimpse of the person’s understanding of the world. It is qualitative instrument for examining subjective theories and offers a chance to uncover personal constructs even if the participants are not aware of these constructs prior to the interviews. Questioning a representative cross section of organisation members seems to be a reasonable way of understanding the social constructions inside an organisation. As the RGT generates qualitative as well as quantitative data it offers a broad range of options for logical and statistical analysis (Backhaus et al., 2006; Fromm, 2004; Raeithel,
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1993). The dimensions of the distinctions drawn here may, for example, be examined by quantitative factor analysis (Fransella et al., 2004).
3
Case study
We selected an organisation (IT sector, nationwide) for our explorative case study that combined both forms of work at the same time. One part of the staff (600 full-time-employees’) was operating an IT data centre while the other part (650 full-time-employees’) was carried out project work. As managers should have to balance permanent as well as temporary work processes (Sahlin-Andersson and Söderholm, 2002) we randomly picked 24 managers (12 project managers and 12 line managers) across all management levels to be interviewed. This involved 27% of the management in the study. The empirical research took six months, starting with four explorative expert interviews as a preliminary study. The interviews were held to identify organisational roles that were especially meaningful in the organisation. After having analysed those four semi-structured interviews we started the repertory grid interviews using the software Gridsuite 2.1. Four managers took part in pre-test interviews. The objective of this pre-test was to verify if the organisational roles chosen were meaningful to the managers and if the repertory grid interviews were capable of evoking contradictions. After the pre-test the main 16 interviews (eight line managers, eight project managers) were conducted. The interviews took between 45 an 120 minutes each and were held in a triad version (Rosenberger and Freitag, 2009). This version of repertory grid interviews contains three steps that can be repeated as long as the participant is able to express new distinctions. In the first step, the participant is asked to group two out of three elements: ‘group two of these three elements that have something in common’. This step often happens intuitively. It follows the idea of drawing a distinction, in the sense of Spencer-Brown’s laws of form (Spencer-Brown, 1969). The second step is to paraphrase the commonality: ‘What is the communality of these two elements in opposite of the third?’. In this step, one pole of the distinction is set. The final step focuses on the distinction between the pair and the singular element: ‘Please express how the single element is different from the pair!’. The preliminary study pointed to 12 elements that were used in random combinations to evoke distinctions: •
job as a departmental head today/ideal job as a departmental head
•
job as an expert today/ideal job as an expert
•
job as a project manager today/ideal job as a project manager
•
job as a programme manager today/ideal job as a programme manager
•
job as a people manager today/ideal job as a people manager
•
my job today/ideal my job.
3.1 Findings The participants were able to express 178 distinctions that seemed to have an impact on their work as line and project managers. This is an average of 8.9 pairs of constructs. A principal component analysis (PCA) showed that more than 70% of the variance could be
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explained by two basic factors: the distinctions between temporary and permanent work (45.2%) and the distinction between management and expert work (27.1%) (Figure 2). Figure 2
Principal component analysis 1 (45.2 %) people manager
department manager 2 (27.1 %)
expert
project manager
program manager
PCA (Varimax), Axes: ‐6.16 to + 6.16
The following table exemplifies how managers expressed their distinctions. Those pairs of construct are included in this list that correlate significant (p < .05) to component one (Table 2). A correlation indicates that phrases describe the component best. They offer a profound insight into the organisation’s language. Table 2
Pairs of construct loading on component 1
ID
Temporary work (bottom)
Permanent work (top)
129 26 77 3 12 10 150 89 94 109 111 6 24 42
Professional leadership Full throttle (operative pressure) Cares for complex technical problems Project first – company second Works with people Leads a temporary team Only cares for his job Social leadership Motivates Plans things he has never done before Demands braking the rules for project reasons Short term-oriented Professional knowledge Motivation
Disciplinary leadership Varies speed (flexible) Cares for people Company first – project second Plans for people Leads a permanent team Is looking for compromises Disciplinary leadership Sanction Routine work Takes responsibility for braking rules Long term-oriented Knows the people Power
We pointed out that one strength of the repertory grid method is the ability to provide quantitative and qualitative data at the same time. We complemented the statistical analysis with a content-based analysis. The dimensions of our framework could be reconstructed within the managers’ feedback by assigning the 178 distinctions to our
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framework in a blind review. The majority of contradictions can be found in the functional dimension of organisations (54.4%). The division of labour, contradictions in the coordination, different aims and contradictory roles all seem to have a strong influence on managers’ work. The contradictions evoked were subsumed into 21 dualities (Table 3). The qualitative analysis undermines the quantitative findings. The most important principal component is the distinction between temporary-professional and permanent-disciplinary leadership. Table 3
Contradictions in project-oriented organisations
Dimension Environment
Purpose
Goals
Division of labour
Coordination
Contradictions (p
