title: Accountability in projects: Project manager perspective
Creators: name: Dodson, Tracy
Publisher: name: University of Glasgow
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: accountability, authority, project management, governance, project manager.

description: This thesis seeks to enhance comprehension of accountability from the perspective of project managers. Both “project management” and “accountability” are ubiquitous terms that have not always been clearly defined in the literature. In addition, whilst much research has looked at accountability in projects from the perspective of the project board and the relationship to the wider organisation, there has been very limited work on accountability from the perspective of the project manager.

Diverging from past approaches to accountability, this study adopts a manager-centric stance. Guided by the pragmatist stance, the study adopts a qualitative research design, with the project manager as the unit of analysis. The data set consist of forty-six semi-structured in- depth interviews, with feedback from forty-six project managers, each with differing levels of experience, across a variety of industries. The findings are derived from the thematic analysis of the interview data.

A key finding suggests that project managers positively embrace their accountability demands as selfaccountability, directly related to their own self-management, as opposed to being influenced by formal external accountability pressures. This finding supports the position that accountability is seen by project managers as the positive action of constructively achieving agreed outcomes, as opposed to accountability in the general business environment, which is a term that can often be viewed, in common usage, as a negative concept implying fault if goals are not achieved. This research also supports the suggestion, initially raised by project managers, that there is that is a mismatch between the demands of being accountable and the requisite levels of formal authority. The findings highlight behavioural strategies adopted by practitioners to rectify the balance. This research also identifies the areas of the project for which the project manager explicitly accepts accountability. Taken together, the findings offer a novel framework of the project manager’s accountability.

The study makes several important contributions to theory. The work generates a renewed conceptualisation of accountability in the context of project management, providing theoretical clarity in this relatively novel context. The final framework integrates several distinct strands to offer a more comprehensive view of accountability. This study offers two new tools for future scholars of project managers to adopt. The first is participatory theory, a theory which has never previously been deployed in the project management context. The study shows that this theory can serve as a useful lens for future scholars, offering an opportunity to advance research in this area with a new lens that accommodates time sensitive and outcomes-based results. Secondly, the study identifies several enhancements to Laughlin’s accountability model that aim to improve its effectiveness as a tool that can be used to illustrate project managers consider and behave when given accountability.

For practitioners, this study highlights the importance of several tools that the project manager might gainfully employ and suggests these tools should be taught in any practically valuable project management training.