Drivers of Project Managers' Compliance Behaviours
Creators: name: Smith, Ann
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2023

description: Projects are the means of organisations' adaptation to their evolving social, political, regulatory, commercial and technological environments. As these environments change, organisations must coordinate their projects with their other organisational needs; to this end, they implement project governance. Significant gains can flow from project governance, including project effectiveness and efficiency as well as organisational learning and protection. To realise these gains requires both that organisations adopt project governance and that project managers (PMs) comply with project governance requirements. However, research suggests that PMs do not always comply with these requirements. Their individual compliance choices are significant, but little research has been conducted on PMs' individual compliance behaviours, which are thus not well understood. To fill this gap in the literature, this interpretive phenomenological research deepens understanding of PMs' individual compliance choices by exploring the related reasons (i.e. the factors that drive their choices) and the ways those choices manifest (i.e. the behaviours they choose). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with PMs in various industries in Australia in 2019. The results demonstrate that PMs exhibit a range of compliance behaviours towards project governance requirements, including full compliance (i.e. demonstrating intention and action to adhere completely to prescribed requirements), partial compliance (i.e. not addressing activities for some elements of project governance requirements), low-quality compliance (i.e. performing these requirements but to a standard below expectations) and noncompliance (i.e. taking no action to implement these requirements, but without malicious intention). Consistent with the complexity of this range of behaviours, a set of factors that drive or shape PMs' compliance choices was identified. These include factors linked to the project context (i.e. time pressure and job pressure), individual-level factors (i.e. self-regulation of emotion, self-efficacy and project management experience) and organisational-level factors (i.e. information about project governance requirements, job autonomy, supervisor support, and sanctions). These findings can be understood through the lens of the conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll 1989). Specifically, PMs draw on resources including their time and creativity, and in managing projects under time pressure or job pressure may perceive project governance requirements as a further threat to their suite of resources. Their choice of compliance behaviours will then be constrained by their available resources; generally, those with fewer personal or organisational resources are more likely to choose aberrant compliance behaviours as defensive means to protect their remaining resources. As one of the few studies that examines PMs' individual behaviours, this research offers several contributions to theory and practice. Its theoretical contributions are that it presents empirical evidence for complexity in PMs' compliance behaviours and provides a theoretical framework for understanding the identified drivers of these individual responses to project governance requirements. It thus deepens the literature, which has previously focused on the conceptualisation and development of project governance at the organisational level. Its practical contribution is that it provides some strategies that organisations can implement to help PMs develop or sustain critical personal resources, to ensure organisational resources are available and to identify and manage PMs at risk of engaging in aberrant compliance behaviours.