The impact of project manager’s competencies on project team performance

Abstract

Management by projects is in the increase as organisation after organisation has joined the “projectification” trend because it is considered effective. This management system is arguably as old as Nimrod the Great hunter before the Lord when he built the first 9 cities ever built on earth. Touted today as a new discipline, but the reality is it has been here and used over the millennia, and like any leadership it is constantly questioned. As the global world gets projectified, there is a need to understand why so many project execution processes fail. The debate is focused on human behaviour since technology has made the operational systems more efficient than ever in the history of humanity. This research focused on the competencies of the project leaders in different sites for one large organisation. Cognisance was taken of the differences of the tasks, the personalities of the leaders and the expectations of the practitioners who are impacted on by the resultant leadership style. The competencies of these different leaders and the general practice as perceived by the subordinates was investigated. A taxonomy of sorts of the competencies expected of effective leadership was compiled as part of the study of what would be ideal generic competencies. The population understudy was project practitioners in IT based operations. A handful of practices were identified which would ideally comprise of the competencies for effective project team leaders who want performing teams. A questionnaire was distributed to project managers and team members in different depots for the reasons of collecting data for this research. Random sampling was used to remove and bias and subjectivity in the participants’ selection process. This was repeated at every site where these IT projects were taking place, and this allowed for objective data collection methods which gave both validity and reliability of the information gathered. The Responses was captured on Excel Spread Sheet (ESS) and analysed using diagrams and graphs. analysed using a two-sample t-test. A research instrument (questionnaire) was created for the reasons of collecting data for this research. The mixed research procedure that was utilized educated on the idea of the questionnaire to be used, consequently the questionnaire was. There is a theoretical evidence that project manages play a huge role towards the performance of the team members. Even the results from the questionnaire showed that. The research finding should be of assistance to many project coordinators at their different levels and with the different types of tasks and competencies to apply to positively impact project team and eliminate project failures.