The Psychology and Management of Project Teams

Today’s fast paced business world has made projects the primary form of organization for reacting to the challenges imposed by this environment. This still increasing trend to build on projects for important non-routine tasks has gripped almost every domain and industry. Therefore, research on project management also proliferated in the past decades and to date, a vast amount of knowledge accumulated regarding success factors, such as how to optimize planning and executing projects. Relative to the prolific work on such more technical elements of project management, the human side of project management has received less attention. However, it is people who conceive, plan, and carry out projects, and in the context of projects, people are normally organized in project team(s). While this might appear self-evident, taking this human side seriously would imply to integrate theory from the fields of organizational psychology and organizational behavior in the literature on project management, which, however, has not happened to an adequate extent so far. This seems to be a critical problem, because these “human factors” might easily hamper carrying out any project plan, no matter how sophisticated, or (over)compensate weaknesses in the project plan and circumstances, such as less than adequate resource provisions.

Therefore, actively tackling this topic has been overdue and the new book The Psychology and Management of Project Teams, co-edited by François Chiocchio, E. Kevin Kelloway, and Brian Hobbs intends to do exactly this. They target the audiences of both project management and organizational psychology scholars in a call to join forces in the study of project management teams. Specifically, the objectives the book editors set out are to “provide useful information to both groups and to build bridges between them. The ultimate goal is the development of an integrated stream of research on project teams” (p. 1). Indeed, this edited volume goes beyond a mere call for integrated research, it provides useful theoretical starting points that can be either used as a theoretical foundation for integrated research on this topic or as food for thought triggering ideas for advancing research on project teams in novel directions.

The book can be subdivided into four major sections of content. In the first section, the introduction, the editors outline the lack of interdisciplinary connection between the literatures of project management and organizational psychology. In the second section follow chapters defining and conceptualizing what can be understood as projects and project teams, along with their peculiar characteristics. While these two sections have been written by scholars from the field of project management, in the third section then essays of organizational psychologists are presented. These essays reflect research streams from their field that hold relevance for the understanding of the human side of project management. Specifically, these chapters deal with the broader research streams of top down impacts on project teams (such as leadership), bottom-up impacts on project teams (such as motivation), important processes in project teams (such as conflict), project team composition (such as team diversity), and development and learning in project teams. Of course, given the scopes of both project management and organizational psychology, other topics could have been meaningfully integrated in this volume as well. Moreover, there is no way a single volume, even one as multifaceted as this, could give a comprehensive account of the intersection of project management and organizational psychology, and the editors wisely make no such promises. Nonetheless, the selection of topics underscores the broad, and still largely untapped, potential that lies in the theoretical repertoire of organizational psychology for the research on project teams. In the fourth and last section of the book, the editors provide a theoretical foundation for project team research, by developing a multi-level framework they derived from the research streams on project teams presented in the book. It is the development of this integrated framework (which is accompanied by the useful proposition for reporting standards in project team research) that sets the book apart from many other edited volumes, which represent collections of essays that often seem more appropriate for publication in journals than bound in hardback.

So, do the editors reach their self-set objectives with this book? Regarding the first one, the answer surely is yes. The book provides very useful information to scholars and students of project management and organizational psychology alike that will help close the gap between these two disciplines. Given that the insights gained in these disciplines are likely to inform each other, this book is very timely and should provide a spark for igniting more active conversation between the two camps. In this regard, we agree with the editors that this is not a one-way street with organizational psychologists telling project management scholars what to do theory wise. Instead, research on teams in organizational psychology can also benefit from project management insights, as they provide theoretical grounding for important contextual contingencies in project teams. Do the authors also achieve their second, ultimate, goal to develop an integrated research stream on project teams? In this respect, we are not sure. Not because we question the value of this book, but more so because we are not sure whether such a specialized separate research stream on project teams (above and beyond the existing literatures on organizational psychology and project management) is actually needed or beneficial. Rather, we hope that the peculiarities of project teams find more recognition in team research in organizational psychology, and that the human side of project management is treated more prominently in the literature on project management. Both can be triggered and supported by integrating works such as this book. A nice analogy comes from research on technology and innovation management that underwent a similar stage in the 1990s, when the human side of technology and innovation management was still largely ignored in this discipline and the seminal edited volume by Ralph Katz (1997) served as a catalyst to integrate theory from organizational psychology in this literature. It would be most welcome if the new book by Chiocchio et al. (2015) played a similar role for project management – it has the potential to do so.