Construction project practitioners' expectations of team leader behaviour that motivate performance at selected construction sites in Cape Town

Abstract

The field of project management (PM) is rapidly expanding in terms of understanding of its extent and range of perspectives. What was formerly managed as company operations is now progressively being handled as projects. This is probably due to the considerable environmental, economic, and communal implications of construction activity. Project managers perform an extremely crucial role in the formulation of rules and the formation of a collective spirit of collaboration. The study aims to understand the expectations that project practitioners have from the team leaders whilst undertaking a project. It intends to uncover the expected behaviors of project team leaders while leading a team. The research looks at the role of management control in project success. It found it important to outline and specify what is expected from the practitioners to avoid misunderstanding. Projects by their nature are limited by time, quality and budget all of which are determined by the scope of the work to be done. On the other hand, the construction tasks are generally heavy duty and tiring, too often resulting in the slowdown of operations or absenteeism by the workers. In such an environment the role played by the leader is critical, in that the leader behaviour to a large extent affects the worker morale. The generality of the team leaders are engineers or people from the hard skills discipline and know their job well enough, and hence the position that they are given. Too often they expect that everybody understands and has to do what they are employed to do, but the tasks to be performed have an impact of the determination. The leader’s behaviour in the process becomes critical for boosting the morale of the project practitioners. The focus of the study is on the impact of the leader behaviour and how this builds or destroys the morale of the workforce at the construction sites. The team members at the low level understand better what behaviour constitutes that would motivate them or demotivate them.