The project-oriented organisation : an empirical investigation of its impact on performance through driving promotors
Alexander Kock, Patrick Lehner, Hans Georg Gemünden · Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften digital collection (Zurich University of Applied Sciences) · 2021
The concept of the project-oriented organisation describes a management philosophy and an organisation’s desired competences that sustainably create, support, and exploit a stream of projects, programs, and project portfolios, which deliver value to the project-owning organisation. Although the development of these competences is based on practical experience, systematic literature research, and multiple empirical studies, each of the derived competences was individually developed and tested in a specific study. A simultaneous analysis of all competences’ impact on success, which also compares the strength of these factors, is lacking. This is the first aim of the current quantitative study. A second aim is to analyse how promotors create and maintain a project-oriented organisation’s critical competences. The empirical test is based on data of 105 project-oriented organisations with two key informants: upper-level project portfolio-decision makers and middle-level managers. The results show that the investigated competences positively relate to the success of the project-oriented organisation and predict 50% of the variance in performance. The power, expert, and process promotors are significant drivers of all investigated competencies. Promotors also predict the success of the project portfolio and this relationship is fully mediated by the project-oriented organisation’s competences. Promotor engagement drives the development of the project-oriented organisation, but it does not explain additional variance of performance, suggesting that the model has reached a sufficient level of saturation.