Supporting organizational adaptation through successful strategic and operational project portfolio management

A major challenge for organizations’ strategic management is to cope with uncertainty and constantly adapt to a turbulent environment. In organizations, project portfolios constitute the responsible entities to operationalize the adaptation by developing new opportunities and ensuring the implementation of an adapted organizational strategy. Thus, in this dissertation, I investigate how project portfolio and project management can strategically and operationally cope with uncertainty, increase portfolio and project success, and thereby support an organization’s successful adaptation. In regards to the strategic decision-making of portfolio management, I empirically reveal that decision-makers can effectively cope with projects’ and environment’s uncertainty through real options reasoning and thereby increase portfolio innovativeness and success. Furthermore, I show that portfolios consisting of agile projects benefit the valuable recognition of emergent strategies. In addition, I highlight the important role of entrepreneurial orientation and innovation climate as antecedents and moderators of portfolio management decisions. In regards to the operational implementation of a portfolio’s strategy, I investigate how portfolio and project managers can cope with projects’ uncertainty in their operational decisions. I show that project management effort causally increases projects’ profitability and that the marginal impact of project management effort increases for higher project complexity. Furthermore, I show that project managers’ reporting behavior is significantly associated with projects’ future performance. This dissertation contributes new insights on portfolio and project management in general and portfolio management’s strategic and operational decision-making under uncertainty in particular. Furthermore, it adds new aspects to the interaction between portfolio and project management and thereby opens up new perspectives on behavioral and contextual decision-making in portfolio and project management

Beyond user acceptance: The determinants of the intention to produce user created contents on the internet

The advance in User Created Contents (UCCs) web sites like YouTube changed the role of Internet users from contents receivers to contents creators; a role which requires more pro-active user behaviour. However, the literature on user behaviour in information technology lacks theories that explain the pro-active user behaviour of producing and sharing UCCs with others on the Internet. This paper aims to reveal the major attributes of Internet users that have a positive impact on the intention to produce UCCs on the Internet. Extant related theories are reviewed to extract major factors of Internet users that lead to the production of UCCs. A questionnaire survey is administrated to 400 sampled respondents in South Korea to test the relationships among the identified factors. The results show that playfulness, self-expressiveness/sharing intention, innovativeness, computing skills and reward have a positive impact on the intention to produce UCCs. In particular, innovativeness turned out to have the biggest impact, while social participation is not a significant factor. Mediator variables such as age, gender and types of UCC also turned out to be playing a role in the causal relationships among the factors and the intention to produce UCCs. A model pertaining to the intention to produce UCCs online is developed and tested. The academic and practical implications of the study are also discussed in details

IT Project Management & Managerial Risk: Effects of Overconfidence

Due to high IT project failure rates, risk management in IT projects has attracted significant research interest and continues to be an important research and managerial concern. Recently, a stream of IS research has focused on the risks posed by managerial decision making on IT projects, by showing how managers themselves are a major source of risk by falling prey to various heuristics and biases while making decisions at various stages of IT project management. In this study, we explore one of the concepts i.e. overconfidence, and have proposed some potential areas of research. We hope that empirical examination of the propositions will give an insight into the details of how managers become victims of own biases through overconfidence thus causing severe yet systematic risks to the IT projects

The Dynamics of IT Project Status Reporting: A Self-Reinforcing Cycle of Distrust

Accurate project status reporting is important to avoid the problem of information technology (IT) project escalation and to successfully manage and deliver IT projects. One approach that some organizations have taken is to audit their IT projects to avoid surprises that are frequently associated with inaccurate status reporting. Little is known, however, about the effects that such auditing arrangements can have on the dynamics of project status reporting. To examine the process of IT project status reporting in this context, we followed a grounded theory inspired approach in which we investigated nine IT projects in one U.S. state’s government agencies. All of the projects we studied were subject to the state’s IT oversight board. Based on 118 interviews with a variety of stakeholders including technical personnel, managers, users, and contractors, we present a grounded theory of project status reporting dynamics in which the reporting process can best be characterized as a self-reinforcing cycle of distrust between the project team and the auditors. Specifically, in some projects, we observed a pattern whereby project teams interpreted the auditor’s scrutiny as unfair and as not adding value to their projects. As a result, they responded by embracing some defensive reporting tactics. The auditors interpreted the project team’s actions as indicating either deception or incompetence, and they then increased their scrutiny of the reports, thus exacerbating the situation and further fuelling the cycle of distrust. We discuss implications for both theory and practice

Withholding Bad News In Information Technonlogy Projects: The Effect Of Positive Psychology

Managers of IT projects (PMs) tend to gloss over the reality in their external reports including withholding bad news ( mum effect ). Reasons that have been suggested for this bias can be classified as personal-oriented and project-oriented. This paper is an initial study on the impact of positive psychology on IT project management. Prior studies have found that High Psychological Positive Capital (PsyCap) of individuals is positively correlated with their work satisfaction and higher performance. PsyCap comprises individual\u27s positive capacities of optimism, hope, resilience and efficacy. Drawing from Beck\u27s cognitive theory, we hypothesized that High PsyCap PMs, when required to report bad news to a client, are inclined to consider the project-oriented reasons rather than the personal-oriented ones. As a result, they are more willing to report bad news compared to Low PsyCap PMs. A questionnaire consisting of four cases of bad news in IT projects, together with PsyCap tests, was distributed to professional communities on the internet. Data was collected from 42 respondents. The results of the statistical analysis have shown some support for our hypotheses. The research encourages more research on PsyCap contribution to various aspects of project performance and success. Such research may also have practical implications for PM recruiting and training

Impression management and organizational audiences: The Fiat Group case

Author's accepted manuscript. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10551-013-1991-9In this paper we investigate whether, and how, corporate management strategically uses disclosure to manage the perceptions of different organizational audiences. In particular, we examine the interactions between the FIAT Group and three of its key organizational audiences—the local press, the international press, and the financial analysts, which are characterized by different levels of salience for the company. We focus on both how management reacts to the optimism level existing within each audience and how the narrative disclosure tone adopted by FIAT influences the ex-post optimism in the local and international press or in the financial analyst community. We investigate the disclosure of the FIAT Group over a 6-year period (2004–2009), during which 70 price-sensitive press releases were published. On the basis of 1,887 (331) news articles published in Italian (international) newspapers and 411 analyst reports, we report evidence of different strategic patterns in the interaction processes between FIAT and its audiences. Our findings also indicate some differences in the way FIAT is affected by, and in turn, affects the sentiment of each audience, thus highlighting that the salience of the stakeholder is an important driver of the adoption of impression management techniques. Taken together, our findings point to issues related to setting the “tone at the top” and potential ethical matters. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015Italian Ministry of Research (MIUR

Impression management and organizational audiences: The Fiat Group case

Author's accepted manuscript. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10551-013-1991-9In this paper we investigate whether, and how, corporate management strategically uses disclosure to manage the perceptions of different organizational audiences. In particular, we examine the interactions between the FIAT Group and three of its key organizational audiences—the local press, the international press, and the financial analysts, which are characterized by different levels of salience for the company. We focus on both how management reacts to the optimism level existing within each audience and how the narrative disclosure tone adopted by FIAT influences the ex-post optimism in the local and international press or in the financial analyst community. We investigate the disclosure of the FIAT Group over a 6-year period (2004–2009), during which 70 price-sensitive press releases were published. On the basis of 1,887 (331) news articles published in Italian (international) newspapers and 411 analyst reports, we report evidence of different strategic patterns in the interaction processes between FIAT and its audiences. Our findings also indicate some differences in the way FIAT is affected by, and in turn, affects the sentiment of each audience, thus highlighting that the salience of the stakeholder is an important driver of the adoption of impression management techniques. Taken together, our findings point to issues related to setting the “tone at the top” and potential ethical matters. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015Italian Ministry of Research (MIUR

The Effects of Discrete Emotions on Risky Decision Making

Contrary to the dominant view that generally equates feelings with poor thinking, converging evidence indicates that decisions – including those involving risk – are influenced by affective experiences. Research, however, is limited to studies on undifferentiated, global positive versus negative mood states; less is known about the influence of discrete emotions. The purpose of this research was to extend the affect-cognition literature by (a) examining the effects of discrete emotions varying along the dimensions of valence and arousal, and (b) identifying the systematic ways that discrete emotions underlie risky decision making. We used a set of emotion-laden IAPS images to elicit and compare the impact of incidental emotions on risky decision making. One hundred and twenty-two undergraduate students were randomly assigned to one of the four affective conditions: excitement, contentment, fear, and sadness. Following the emotion induction procedure, participants completed the Choice Dilemmas Questionnaire (CDQ) to assess their risk-taking propensity. Results indicated an interaction effect between valence and arousal for positive emotions, such that excited participants were significantly more risky in their decision making compared to contented participants. The discussion focuses on the theoretical and practical health implications of these findings. We recommend that future research capitalize on the insights gained from emotion research and use it favorably to improve decision making under risk

Context and Timing in Bad News Reporting: An Exploratory study in IS projects

Failure to report bad news at the right time has been one of the major contributors to IS project failures. While prior studies have identified many factors that can affect bad news reporting, there is a dearth of research on how context and timing affect the perception and reporting of bad news. Furthermore, little is known about how individuals perceive and process different types of bad news that can emerge during a project’s lifecycle. In this study, we employ a multiple case study approach to address these important theoretical gaps that exist within the bad news reporting literature. Our aim to shed light on how context and timing affect bad news reporting in IS projects

The Impact Of Relationships And Confucian Ethics On Chinese Employees’ Whistle-Blowing Willingness In Software Projects

One of the reasons why software projects suffer from high failure rate is that employees working on the project are often reluctant to blow the whistle informing the upper-level management about the failing status of the project. In this study, we examine the impacts of organizational commitment, interpersonal closeness, and Confucian ethics on the employees’ whistle-blowing intentions in the Eastern culture context. Based on data collected from 144 Chinese MBA students, we found that the relationship with the organization and that with the wrongdoer both significantly affect the employees’ willingness to blow the whistle. With respect to the influence of Confucian ethics, we found that the employee’s ethical disposition on loyalty between sovereign and subject positively affects the whistleblowing willingness, and the employee’s ethical disposition on trust between friends positively moderates the relationship between closeness with the wrongdoer and the whistle-blowing willingness