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Perceived organizational performance and trust in project manager and top management in project-based organizations: Comparative analysis using statistical and grey systems methods

Saad Ahmed Javed (College of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China) (Department of Management Sciences, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan)
Ali Murad Syed (College of Business Administration, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, Dammam, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia)
Sara Javed (Institute for Grey Systems and Decision Sciences, GreySys Foundation, Lahore, Pakistan)

Grey Systems: Theory and Application

ISSN: 2043-9377

Article publication date: 28 June 2018

Issue publication date: 2 July 2018

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to empirically analyze the effect of the relationship between trust in top management (TTM) and trust in immediate supervisor (TIS), who was organizational project manager in our case, on perceived organizational performance in Pakistani public and private project-based organizations (PBOs).

Design/methodology/approach

The survey (N=108) was done using a questionnaire that was sent to project managers in the selected PBOs in Pakistan with a request to forward it to their immediate subordinates. Later, established statistical techniques (correlation and regression analyses) and gray incidence analysis models were applied to test the hypotheses.

Findings

The results from both methods reveal that TTM was more strongly correlated to perceived organizational performance of PBOs and, in general, public sector employees are more trusted than private sector employees. The gray method revealed that in both private and public PBOs, trust in project manager is greater predictor of perceived organizational performance, while statistical analysis confirmed this only for private sector PBOs. According to statistical analysis, the public sector employees who trust their top management are more likely to have good perception of the organizational performance. Later, the study argues that because of the proven superiority of gray methods over statistics on small samples, the results obtained from gray method should be used for decision making and implications.

Originality/value

The study is pioneer in evaluating the association between TIS and TTM in PBOs using both statistical and gray systems methods.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

The work on this paper was started when S.A. Javed, the corresponding author, was writing his Masters in Project Management thesis, under the supervision of Dr A.M. Syed, which was submitted to COMSATS Institute of Information Technology (CIIT), Pakistan, as a requirement for graduation. Therefore, he wants to thank CIIT. Later, after joining PhD program at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA), China, he revised the work. During the revision phase, S. Javed from the GreySys Foundation, Pakistan, significantly helped. The authors also want to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments on the earlier version of this paper.

Citation

Javed, S.A., Syed, A.M. and Javed, S. (2018), "Perceived organizational performance and trust in project manager and top management in project-based organizations: Comparative analysis using statistical and grey systems methods", Grey Systems: Theory and Application, Vol. 8 No. 3, pp. 230-245. https://doi.org/10.1108/GS-01-2018-0009

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited

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