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Agile project management methods gain increasing attention of practitioners while they often remain neglected by scholarly research. Specifically, there is little known about how performance factors of agile firms differ from those of traditional firms. Scholars argue that these factors often relate to a firm’s human resource management (HRM). This study aims to analyze and compare the HRM architectures in agile and traditional project-based organizations that lead to high firm performance.

The authors apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis on data of 154 project-based organizations of diverse professional service industries in Russia.

This study’s findings suggest that HRM architectures of high-performance agile firms imply a broad use of ability-, motivation- and opportunity-enhancing practices and a high degree of HRM process centralization, while traditional firms adopt more diverse HRM architectures.

Based on this study’s results, the authors stress the importance of ensuring a good fit between a company’s project management approach and HRM architecture. The revealed configurations may also provide guidance for practitioners on designing effective HRM architectures in project-based organizations.

This paper aims to explore how teaching activities can enhance the professional identity of master’s students as they explore careers.

The data were gathered through qualitative semi-structured interviews with 57 participants, 2nd-year master’s program students from a Russian business school, shortly before graduation.

The research results reveal a lack of reflection on professional identity and introspection through personality traits among master’s program students. This insight is vital for strengthening students’ professional identity in higher education, emphasizing the importance of reflection. Furthermore, our research underscores the idea that business schools should prioritize career-related courses to bolster the student’s professional identity. These findings provide a new perspective on the role of professional identity in career development, enlightening the field of management education.

Understanding the professional identity and career strategies of young people is crucial. It equips educators, employers and policymakers with the necessary guidance and teaching activities to prepare students for their professional journey. This study provides practical insights that can be directly applied in management education, ensuring that students are well-prepared for their future careers. We suggest using the concept of an intelligent career and three interdependent competencies (“ways of knowing”) reflecting why, how and with whom people work to develop course matriculation and teaching activities.

This study contributes to a better understanding of the students’ professional identities and identifies teaching activities that could be considered in management education.

The authors wanted to study the theme as there hasn’t been much research into the different factors for high performance in agile versus traditional companies.

The authors conducted a quantitative study of Russian professional services firms using structured phone interviews. They compared project-based companies using agile methods with rival firms that used more traditional methods. The questionnaire included questions on the role of HRM, the level of business strategy formalization, the use of strategies to enhance motivation and opportunities. There were also questions about agile frameworks and project management practices. The sample contained 154 companies, 61 of which used agile technologies.

They found that agile firms tend to rely more on HMR policies than traditional companies, especially on strategies to enhance motivation and opportunity. Agile companies also have more centralized HRM architectures with less delegation of different levels of management. Meanwhile, the results show that the HRM architectures for successful traditional firms are more diverse. HRM practices in these companies have different levels of importance and various degrees of decentralization and digitalization.

The authors say their study fills a gap because there hasn’t been much research into the different factors for high performance in agile versus traditional companies. The study, they say, has important theoretical and practical implications, and also provides evidence of the importance of HRM practices for organizational success.