الگوهای توانمندسازی و سبک رهبری در محیط پروژه

The current study explores the relationship of empowerment, leadership style and customer service as a measure of effective project management in projects with varying degree of virtuality. The study makes comparisons of empowerment climate in less and more virtual projects. Moreover, the study examines moderating effects of degree of virtuality on the relationship between empowerment and leadership style. We test our hypotheses with data collected from project management professionals working in five countries using linear regression and moderated regression analysis to analyze the proposed hypotheses. Results demonstrate that empowerment climate has a significant effect on concern for task, concern for people and customer service and is higher in more virtual than less virtual projects thus leading to effective virtual project management. Moreover, we found virtuality moderates the relationship between empowerment and concern for people. Findings of this study have significant implications for leadership behaviours and project performance at project management workplace.

Increased productivity, higher quality products and services, improved teamwork and customer service, increased speed and responsiveness has led to the eminence of empowerment (Shelton, 1991, Brown, 1992, Von Dran, 1996 and Appelbaum and Honeggar, 1998). Previous research has demonstrated a positive relationship between team empowerment and colocated team performance (Burpitt and Bigoness, 1997 and Kirkman and Rosen, 1999). To date, however, little attention has been paid to virtual team empowerment (Kirkman et al., 2004). Kirkman et al. (2004) work on virtual teams suggests that team empowerment is positively related to process improvement and customer satisfaction in virtual teams. This paper takes further the work of Kirkman et al. (2004) and compares it to two virtual project environments. His work focused on psychological empowerment while this present study takes of empowerment climate as the basis for research. Here we have taken empowerment as the independent variable and effective virtual project management as the dependent variable measured through customer service and leadership style (concern for both task and people). We define and discuss these variables in the next section. It is also suggested that project management will be effective if these measures of leadership style (customer service and leadership style) are high in virtual projects. Virtual teams can rapidly respond to business globalization challenges (Kayworth and Leidner, 2001; Maznevski and Chudoba, 2000 and Montoya-Weiss et al., 2001) and their use is expanding exponentially (Kirkman et al., 2002). Thus there is a need to understand further the role of empowerment in virtual projects. Cohen and Bailey (1997) suggests that empowerment research should also be conducted on various types of teams, including management teams, project teams, and virtual teams, to determine if the results of their findings with permanent work teams are generalizable (Cohen and Bailey, 1997). Kirkman et al. (2004) suggest that researchers who build models of virtual team effectiveness should include empowerment as an important predictor variable. This study supports the growing body of research on empowerment suggesting that it to be a very important construct for building models of virtual project teams. This article is organized as follows: we first introduce ‘project management effectiveness’, and then how ‘leadership style’ and customer service can be a measure of project management effectiveness and lastly ‘virtuality as a continuum and moderator’. We further discuss empowerment climate and its significance with leadership behaviour and customer service and explain the approach adopted in this research work. After proposing the hypotheses, we study the relationship between empowerment climate and leadership behaviour (concern for both task and people) and customer service. Key results of the survey are presented and discussed. The article concludes with a discussion of the general contribution of this study.

Our study adds to the growing body of research on empowerment in more and less virtual projects and explores the relationships of leadership style and customer service with empowerment and how these relationships contribute to effective virtual project management. In view of our findings, we hope that project management professionals will be better conscious of both psychological empowerment and empowerment climate and concern for people in their projects with varying degree of virtuality.