The psychology and management of project teams

François Chiocchio, E. Kevin Kelloway, Brian Hobbs

"Organizations today are increasingly using projects in their daily activities. Projects and project-management principles frame goal attainment in academia and many business sectors, and they even serve as theoretical footing for organizational-change endeavors. However, the ubiquity of project management does not mean that project work, project teams, and the ways organizations use projects are well understood. Moreover, while project-management theory and practice aim at providing structure and control to enable successful project completion, an alarmingly high percentage of projects struggle or fail. As the authors of The Psychology and Management of Project Teams explain, this is in part because projects are still mostly managed as technical systems rather than behavioral systems. Even though project-management researchers have become increasingly interested in factors that may...