Behavioral analysis of project team performance in China

This research focuses on the operation of project teams in professional institutions (e.g. consulting, engineering and design) from the aspects of organizational behavior and performance. Theorists and practitioners have long applied research results from the theories of management, organization, sociology, and psychology into the study of project procurement performance. Although competing models addressing the relationships among relevant variables, such as performance, motivations, leadership, power etc. have been hypothesized, the amount of vigorous empirical testing of these propositions however is insufficient. In this research, a rational model has been constructed, tentatively attempting to depict the reasonable causalities among project managers' behaviors, team members' motivations, and performance within project teams in present-day China. Here, it is hypothesized that the project managers' behaviors (deriving from leadership and power features) are of independence, and proactively influence upon the motives of team members, which then lead them to attend acts to the attainment of the expected project outputs. A field survey has been conducted to measure quantitatively the variables by means of a questionnaire elaborated theoretically and situationally. By the employment of the sophisticated Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) technique, the a priori hypothesized structural relations have been statistically verified and a modified model which reveals the relational effects among different variables is achieved. As a complement of the quantitative analysis, a qualitative study, by means of field interviewing, has also been carried out to explore deeply the behavioral phenomena within the project teams. Both the quantitative and qualitative studies reveal that the situation of present-day China's project team performance is reasonably portrayed by this model. Consistencies between postulated hypothesis and the empirical outcomes are evident. Testing results show that project managers' leadership (Performance-oriented) and personal charisma exert salient influences on team members' performance. The project managers proactively adopt behavioral flexibility for the optimization of team members' performance. Such flexibility is presumably suggested, and also empirically proven, to be caused mainly by the managers' personal features, such as expertise and charisma. The team members perceive their project managers as having less power possession in some aspects such as benefit (money) allocation. Additionally, it reveals that the professional team members possess strong expert power which reinforces their resistance to comply with the project managers. The implementation of project teams' goals should be ascribed mainly to personal factors of project team members, since the present-day's system of benefit allocation in China's State-owned professional organizations functions ineffectively and inefficiently in terms of its influence to rouse team members' commitment to projects.