A central issue in project-based organizations (PBOs) is how to balance the need for flexibly responding to changing customer demands and creating consistent performance in the organization at large. This article discusses the relevance of a routine dynamics lens for understanding this dilemma. We show how routine dynamics might help to understand how and under what conditions routines—with their dual capacity for stability and change—produce a variety of performances, some stable and some varying, in the PBO. As such, we contribute to the stream of research that seeks to explain how PBOs build capabilities and how they work.

This article analyzes the relationships between project performance and the team’s ability, motivation, and opportunity (AMO). We contribute to the project management literature by exploring which combinations of AMO factors are best for project performance at different levels of complexity. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 285 projects. Our study shows that in simple projects, ability is the key factor both as a main effect and as a constraining factor that acts as a bottleneck for project performance. In the case of complex projects, the multiplicative model is superior given the significant interaction effects of motivation.

Depending on the sector and type of deliverable (e.g., infrastructure or software), many projects can be understood along the lines of a time-based ‘system’s life.’ This early model suggests that the elements of a system’s life can be understood as a relatively consistent sequence of four phases: strategic planning; construction and development (delivery); operations and use; and decommissioning and replacement. While a great deal of research focuses on the specificities of various project phases, there are a number of technical, organizational, economic, and managerial challenges relating to the transitions across the phases. Surprisingly, transition-related project phenomena remain remarkably under-investigated. As illustrated in the time-based perspective of the conceptual figure below, we often see three main project transition points in practice (represented as stars). Addressing transitional issues in projects is important not only for creating projects that deliver value to their respective organizations, users, and operators but also to maintain a more effective delivery while moving from one phase to the next. Transitional issue examples include, but are far from limited to, challenges such as the handover of data and knowhow, change in the workforce, and scope management. We solicit theoretical and empirical contributions on any projectrelated topic concerning transitions. One may choose to focus on transitions across the temporal phases of the system’s life as the main conceptual framework. However, we strongly encourage contributions addressing project transitions under new or different conceptual lenses.

Managing projects raises multiple tensions such as the need to balance cooperativeness and assertiveness. By adopting a process perspective, we analyze why a project group consisting of three heterogeneous subgroups is failing to uphold such balance over time. Instead, overemphasizing cooperativeness in the early phases of the project led to over-assertiveness and escalation of group conflict. We identify three mechanisms for reinforcing dynamics. First, we find that subgroups overestimate other subgroups’ behavioral autonomy, which promotes holding simplified, negative images of each other. Second, subgroups adopt vertical disidentification when they define their own particular role. Third, cooperativeness conceals pejorative perceptions.

This study examined the role of career attitudes and behaviors and employability enhancement factors in predicting project managers’ career success facets, over and above the availability of clear career paths. An online survey was completed by 552 Italian project managers. Clear career paths, employability culture, and protean career attitude positively predicted both objective and subjective (along with objective boundarylessness) career success. Dominance analysis showed the prevailing role of protean career, employability culture, and clear career paths. Results built a bridge between project management literature and career studies, particularly informing about the significance of the protean career. Organizational and individual implications for practices are discussed.

The failure rate of innovation projects is substantial. Even innovation projects that fare well are sometimes terminated before completion. However, given the importance of innovator passion and commitment to innovative endeavors for successful innovation, such terminations pose the clear and present danger of negatively affecting subsequent innovation projects. Therefore, it is a key leadership task in the innovation arena to maintain innovator passion for their endeavors despite such setbacks. Our research indicates that authentic leadership is likely to bolster innovator resilience potential in order to minimize the human cost of innovation project terminations.

This study articulates how increasingly pervasive digital information transforms project delivery models. It builds on and extends the literature on innovation and knowledge codification, analyzing London’s evolving digital innovation ecosystem across 15 years of industry/government initiatives and infrastructure megaprojects. Findings suggest profound and ongoing changes in digitally enabled project delivery models. Novel contributions are: first, to identify new generations of integrated solutions; second, to articulate changes in supply chains and relationships with owners, operators, and end users; and third, to recognize the growing importance of digital workflows and analytics, rather than documents. There are implications for project management practice and scholarship.

Many businesses seeking enhanced innovation have corporate research teams that engage in collaborative research projects (CRPs), with external entities such as universities, public organizations, or customers. Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests mixed outcomes of CRPs in terms of corporate research impact, which implies successful transfer of novel knowledge generated within CRPs to company-internal business networks to develop radically innovative products. We use the multiple regression quadratic assignment procedure (MRQAP) and meta-analysis to analyze six CRP networks. Our findings indicate that the network’s relational characteristics (tie strength) and structural characteristics (network range) are important determinants of knowledge transfer at the fuzzy front end of innovation.

In projects, various kinds of formal and informal institutions are crucial for imprinting and controlling behavior. The interplay and potential conflict between these two types of institutions have attracted increasing scholarly and managerial attention, but conventional institutional analyses are hampered by the lack of effective methodological instruments for understanding these institutions and examining their fit (or misfit). Underpinned by the theoretical argument that institutions governing projects are networks, this study employs the methodology of social network analysis (SNA) to capture and analyze institutional interplay. We use four construction projects to illustrate the interplay between formal and informal institutions in projects and to show how this interplay affects project performance. Our findings reveal that, in general, performance is better when there is a better fit—which indicates the extent of interplay—between a project’s formal and informal guiding institutions. We also show how project managers can use SNA to diagnose formal and informal institutions, enhancing their fit and thereby improving project performance. The results presented here have implications for the role of these two institutional types and for how the fit between them can be improved through conscious effort.