Boundary Management in Projects: Antecedents, Activities and Performance

Lisbeth Brøde () and Perttu Dietrich ()
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Perttu Dietrich: Department of Environmental and Business Economics, University of Southern Denmark

No 106/10, Working Papers from University of Southern Denmark, Department of Sociology, Environmental and Business Economics

Abstract: Despite increasing interest among practitioners and the recent scientific explo-rations on the dynamics of boundary management in project and team contexts, the existing studies seems to lack empirical understanding on the factors that explain the boundary management behavior of project managers. The purpose of this study is to analyze how the three antecedent factors - cross-functional participation, embeddedness and top management control - are related to four different types of boundary management activities practiced by project managers, namely coordinating, enabling, reporting and guarding. Based on the sample of 236 projects, the results show that embeddedness and top-management control have positive influence on boundary-management activities and cross-functional participation has both positive and negative contribution to boundary management activities. Furthermore, the results reveal that boundary management activities have both positive and negative influence on project performance. Contributions of the research are discussed, as well as practical implications, limitations, and directions for future research.

Keywords: Boundary management; project team; embeddedness; cross-functional participation; top-management control (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2010-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ppm
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