Project Manager's Leadership Style

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Project leadership is essential in every organisation. Leaders help their clients achieve business results not by just managing projects, but instead, by leading them. The art of leadership with the science of project management is combined in order to achieve success.
‘Project leadership’ is not only down to one person. The skills associated with Project Leadership apply to the individual project manager, the portfolio manager, the head of the PMO and every other member of the organisation to a degree. People at all levels in an organisation must ‘lead’ in order to achieve results.
I will review and discuss findings and opinions from the academic journal ‘Matching the
Project Manager’s Leadership Style to Project Type’ by Ralf Muller & J. …show more content…

However, it recognises that “what differentiates leaders is not their intelligence but their emotional response to situations”.
I personally couldn’t agree more with this statement. From previous experience working in the hotel industry I found that the different methods of approaching staff by the manager and assistant manager were very evident during my time there. The manager had a very short temper and addressed people in an awful manner when things weren’t running smoothly, leaving staff members paranoid and unsettled. When the manager wasn’t present, the assistant manager came up with solutions to issues in a calm and professional manner which made staff members feel calm and appreciated. Both managers in this case had high levels of intelligence but their emotional response to situations differed completely.
Goleman et al. identified nineteen leadership competencies grouped into four dimensions:
1. Personal competencies
Self-awareness (mainly Confucius’s moderation)
Self-management (mainly Confucius’s values)
2. Social competencies
Social awareness (mainly Confucius’s values)
Relationship management (mainly Confucius’s …show more content…

Research Model
Muller and Turner formulated the following hypotheses in order to prove that different project management techniques are better suited on different types of projects, and this would suggest that different leadership styles are also appropriate.
Hypothesis 1: The project manager’s competency, which includes his or her leadership style, is positively correlated to project success.
Hypothesis 2: Different combinations of project leadership competency are correlated with success on different types of project.
Dulewicz and Higgs’ 15 leadership competency table was used for research to test the above hypothesis’.
The dependent variable that was found is project success while the moderating found was the project type.
To test the validity of the research, fourteen people were interviewed from seven companies from eight different countries, ranging in different industries. Company sizes ranged from 50 to 35,000 employees while projects ranged $50,000–$500

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