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Performance feedback can be constructed using firms’ own (historical) performance, or the performance of peers (social). Those two types of performance feedback can be consistent (both positive, both negative) or inconsistent (one positive, the other negative). The research on the impact of consistent versus inconsistent feedback has been inconclusive, suggesting that inconsistent feedback might lead to more intense or less intense responses, or no response. In this paper, we theorize and test how firms respond to (in)consistent performance feedback.

We test our hypotheses on a longitudinal sample of 2,819 private, high-growth firms in the US with 6,688 observations between the years 2007 and 2016. Our dataset comprises 25 different industries. We use topic modeling on textual data from firms’ web pages to capture portfolio expansion.

We find that consistent negative performance feedback strengthens portfolio expansion, but consistent positive feedback does not influence portfolio expansion. We also find that inconsistent performance feedback weakens portfolio expansion, but only with negative historical feedback and positive social feedback.

We contribute to the Behavioral Theory of the Firm by improving our understanding of mechanisms of feedback configurations. Specifically, we elaborate on the role of (in)consistent social feedback when firms respond to historical performance feedback. We also contribute to the theory by better understanding private firms’ responses to performance feedback.

This study aims to examine how embeddedness influences consultants' information seeking when making decisions within a social network of relationships, and how these social networks evolve throughout the project delivery stages. The study is grounded in social network theory and examines embeddedness from three perspectives: structural (network cohesion), relational (tie strength in terms of friendship and knowledge awareness) and actor prominence.

A social network analysis (SNA) questionnaire was administered to a team of consultants working on a management consultancy project in Shanghai, China. The SNA measures of density, degree centrality and betweenness centrality were used to analyse relationship patterns among project team members, permitting comparison between the networks. Networks were also compared across the three project delivery stages of collect, consider and create.

Structural embeddedness was observed in the active information seeking behaviour among consultancy team members. The moderate network density of the self-organising information seeking networks across the project delivery stages ensures that the team remains connected but avoids information redundancy and overload. Relational embeddedness was evident through the multiplexity of ties among team members with overlapping friendship and information seeking relationships. The knowledge awareness network's sparseness indicates a team of autonomous knowledge workers with distributed expertise. Project managers were the most prominent actors across the three project delivery stages, underlining these actors' relational leadership role.

The study provides a deeper understanding of collaborative decision-making behaviours in dynamic-project environments. Limited attempts have been made to visualise and analyse the relationships involved in small consulting teams. The novelty of the network approach adopted stems from its ability to offer a structural view of the relationship among consultants, thus offering a distinctive and arguably more complete picture of consultancy team dynamics.

The study validates the social network theory of embeddedness in a real-world collaborative decision-making setting and provides a deeper understanding of information seeking behaviours for decision-making in dynamic-project environments. From a project management process viewpoint, the evolving nature of the information seeking network as it changes across the project stages with associated actors' roles was also visualised graphically, offering a distinctive and arguably more complete picture of consultancy team dynamics.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the combined effect of gender, trust, leadership style and team integration on entrepreneurial team performance. Through an integrated analysis of gender composition and team processes, we enhance the understanding of the drivers of new venture teams’ performance.

We use data collected from multi-player startup simulations involving 52 teams of masters-level students across two countries. We used the fsQCA methodology to perform a configurational analysis of different team composition and processes. This innovative application of the methodology allows us to identify new combinations of gender diversity and team processes that improve team performance.

Teams with higher proportions of women who shared leadership were more profitable in several configurations, demonstrating the importance of the relationship between gender and leadership models on performance. Shared leadership resulted in high levels of trust and sense of control, which increased team effectiveness and performance. We found that combining trust with shared leadership consistently resulted in successful positive outcomes, although not all successful teams included these attributes.

Our findings contribute to renewing the frame of research on new venture team performance that has long revolved around the leadership-cohesion-alignment (LCA) triangle. Although the LCA paradigm certainly improved our understanding of new venture success, it provided only a partial understanding of the organizational and relational context. It offered a restricted view of the sources of cohesion and alignment. We believe that our approach to data analysis based on the fsQCA method allowed us to extend our understanding of the determinants of entrepreneurial team performance.

The purpose of this paper is to present and analyse the context, the current issues and the opportunities for project management (PM) research within Australia. The paper contributes to researcher and industry practitioner knowledge and debates on supporting and promoting the development of national PM research agendas.

This is a research paper which draws on and interprets empirical data generated from a comprehensive national survey of Australian PM researchers.

The paper first profiles the current landscape of Australian PM research. Thereafter, it explores the future opportunities/risks for PM research in this country, as perceived by the researcher community.

This research was limited to the collection of data from PM researchers across Australia (80 percent response rate to the survey tool). Clearly, this study was confined to one country and to one category of respondent.

This paper will make contributions to national and international debates and analysis on current research trajectories and future opportunities in the PM field and thereby also aid comparative knowledge development within the researcher community.

This paper represents the first comprehensive national PM researcher study undertaken in Australia. It provides a compelling national insight into the current state of PM research as perceived by PM researchers and illustrates issues concerning their research contexts, their links to industry partners and perceptions of industry and industry representative body engagement in PM research activity.

One of the major challenges for any project is to prepare and develop an achievable baseline schedule and thus set the project up for success, rather than failure. The purpose of this paper is to explore and investigate research outputs in one of the major causes, optimism bias, to identify problems with developing baseline schedules and analyse mitigation techniques and their effectiveness recommended by research to minimise the impact of this bias.

A systematic quantitative literature review was followed, examining Project Management Journals, documenting the mitigation approaches recommended and then reviewing whether these approaches were validated by research.

Optimism bias proved to be widely accepted as a major cause of unrealistic scheduling for projects, and there is a common understanding as to what it is and the effects that it has on original baseline schedules. Based upon this review, the most recommended mitigation method is Flyvbjerg’s “Reference class,” which has been developed based upon Kahneman’s “Outside View”. Both of these mitigation techniques are based upon using an independent third party to review the estimate. However, within the papers reviewed, apart from the engineering projects, there has been no experimental and statistically validated research into the effectiveness of this method. The majority of authors who have published on this topic are based in Europe.

The short-listed papers for this review referred mainly to non-engineering projects which included information technology focussed ones. Thus, on one hand, empirical research is needed for engineering projects, while on the other hand, the lack of tangible evidence for the effectiveness of methods related to the alleviation of optimism bias issues calls for greater research into the effectiveness of mitigation techniques for not only engineering projects, but for all projects.

This paper documents the growth within the project management research literature over time on the topic of optimism bias. Specifically, it documents the various methods recommended to mitigate the phenomenon and highlights quantitatively the research undertaken on the subject. Moreover, it introduces paths for further research.

Exploitation of project opportunities may bring more benefits than stipulated in the initial business case, and even stakeholder benefits that nobody thought of at the project initiation. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a new research area for megaprojects, i.e. the phenomenon of project opportunity exploitation as a means to increase the project benefits.

This is a single case study of an infrastructure megaproject, i.e. the construction and operation of a 50+ years old American bridge. Data cover information regarding 60+ years old historical documents, newspaper articles, interviews and video-recordings.

The findings of this paper are as follows: exploiting all opportunities created by the project and increasing project benefits require involvement from many categories of stakeholders; stakeholders get more involved in exploiting the opportunities created by the project when they are proud of the project; for some of the project-related opportunities, it might take a long time before they can be exploited (and related benefits achieved); and celebrating achievements of the project stimulate stakeholders to exploit opportunities created by the project and contribute to further project benefits.

Only few interviews were conducted. Interviewees were biased as all were very proud of the bridge. This is a single case study of a “rare species”, not representing most megaprojects.

To enhance project opportunity exploitation and increased benefits, the project owner (team) must continuously communicate about the project, also after project execution.

This study contributes to a gap within the literature on the phenomenon “project opportunity exploitation”. This is a very rich case study and of a “rare species”.

This research aspires to contribute in the area of exploration of the psychological traits evolving by practitioners within the project management profession. Specifically, it investigates whether there is any difference in optimism levels among experienced project management practitioners and newcomers in the profession.

The research used the life orientation test-revised (LOTR) (Scheier et al., 1994) to calculate respondents’ optimism scores. With these scores at hand, the researchers could then apply inferential statistics in order to deduce any differences observed among optimism score and the respondents’ characteristics (age, years of experience etc.).

Based on the results of this research, several demographic variables were shown to be statistically significant with optimism. These were (1) the number of years of experience the respondent had in managing projects, (2) working in a government organisation and (3) possessing specific project management certifications, all of which were found to adversely affect the respondent’s optimism score.

This research was unique in applying a well-known psychological test instrument (LOTR) to provide insight into the psychological impacts of a career as an information technology (IT) project manager. It is also highly likely that this correlation between the length of time working as a project manager and the adverse impact on their optimism would also apply to not just IT project managers but all experienced project managers.

The purpose of this paper is to consider how multiple logic systems employed by project managers lead to manifold understandings of two foundational project management constructs (“project” and “planning”) that in turn influence both the practice of project management and project outcomes.

Largely conceptual in nature, this paper focuses on the language project managers use to make sense of projects and plans, seeking to get beyond the surface recitation of discourse to the underlying logic systems that influence practice. The discussion is illustrated with stories of practice, collected through interpretive phenomenological interviews with project managers perceived by their peers to demonstrate special skill or knowledge in successfully delivering projects, and reference to project management doctrine embedded in professional standards.

Expert project managers use multiple thinking styles to adapt their practice to emergent project issues. While instrumental rationality helps project managers focus on how to do things, other rationalities, particularly those labeled non‐rational, help them to decide what to do and why to do it. Expert judgment and practice supported by intuitive, holistic, and relational thinking allows project managers to navigate a sophisticated journey from ambiguity to accomplishment.

This paper illustrates how practice research can deconstruct interpretive phenomenological interviews to get beyond identifying the “what”, or empirical evidence, of practice to explore unique individual habitus that inform each individual's practice. Understanding the actions of expert project managers navigating between prescribed project management doctrine and their own praxis opens a space for us to rethink how we research, teach, and talk about project management.

This paper provides insight into the value and implications of practice‐based research by illustrating: how research grounded in practice identifies and raises more complex questions than professional doctrine currently reflects; and how simplifications utilizing duality as a means of theorizing (i.e. “hard” versus “soft”, rational versus non‐rational, etc.) is neither useful nor reflected in expert practice.

This study examines the impact of cultural dimensions on entrepreneurial intentions (EIs) and the mediating role of planned behavior (TPB) determinants between change tolerance (CT), group focus (GF), and EIs for both men and women in the context of international business schools.

Using a quantitative research design, data were collected in France through anonymous questionnaires. The data consisted of responses from 480 business students. Structural equation modeling (SEM) and the bootstrap method with PROCESS macro were used to determine the significance of the mediation effects.

Results reveal the strong impact of CT on the EIs of both men and women through TPB antecedents. They also indicate that GF has an indirect effect on EIs through TPB antecedents for men and an indirect multiple mediation effect on EIs through CT and TPB antecedents for both men and women.

The extended TPB model is original in that it supports both the determinants of planned behavior and cultural dimensions and provides a valuable perspective through its findings on cultural and gender diversity in entrepreneurship.

本研究擬探討文化維度對創業意向的影響；研究亦探討在國際商學院的背景下，對改變的容忍度，群體焦點及男性和女性的創業意向三者之間的計劃行為決定因素所起的調節作用。

透過量化研究設計，研究人員使用匿名問卷，在法國收集數據；數據包括480名商學院學生的囘應。研究使用結構方程模型及自助法，並附上總體過程，來判斷調節效應的重要性。

研究結果顯示、透過計劃行為的前身，對改變的容忍度會對不論男性或女性的創業意向均有重大的影響。研究結果亦顯示，群體焦點對男性而言，會透過計劃行為的前身，對創業意向會有間接的影響，而群體焦點對無論是男性抑或是女性，會透過對改變的容忍度及計劃行為的前身，對創業意向會產生多個間接的調節效應。

伸延的計劃行為模型是富有創意的，因其為計劃行為及文化維度提供支援論據，亦透過研究創業上的文化與性別的多樣性所得到的結果，提供了一個寳貴的觀點。

A project contractor can promote the success of a delivery project by planning the project well and following a project management methodology (PMM). However, various changes typically take place, requiring changes to the project plan and actions that deviate from the firm’s established PMM. The purpose of this paper is to explore different types of changes and change management activities over the lifecycle of delivery projects.

A qualitative single case study design was used. In total, 17 semi-structured interviews were carried out during a delivery project in a medium-sized engineering company that delivers complex systems to industrial customers.

Both plan-related changes and deviations from the PMM were mapped throughout the project lifecycle. Various internal and external sources of change were identified. An illustrative example of the interconnectedness of the changes reveals the potential escalation of changes over the project lifecycle. Managers and project personnel engage in different change management activities and improvisation to create alternative paths, re-plan, catch up, and optimize project performance after changes.

The empirical study is limited to a single case study setting and a single industry. The findings draw attention to the interconnectedness and potential escalation effect of changes over the lifecycle of the project, and the need for integrated change management and improvisation actions.

Efficient change management and improvisation at the early phase of a delivery project can potentially mitigate negative change incidents in later project phases. Changes are not only the project manager’s concern; project personnel’s skilled change responses are also helpful. The findings emphasize the importance of the project customer as a source of changes in delivery projects, meaning that customer relationship management throughout the project lifecycle is needed for successful change management.

The study offers increased understanding of changes and change management throughout the project lifecycle. The results show evidence of plan-related and methodology-related changes and their interconnections, thereby proposing a lifecycle view of integrated change management and improvisation in projects.