From the Editor
Authors: H. Gemünden
Year: 2017

The first article from Marte Pettersen Buvik and Sturle Danielsen Tvedt on “The Influence of Project Commitment and Team Commitment on the Relationship Between Trust and Knowledge Sharing in Project Teams” examines the relationship among trust, commitment, and knowledge sharing. The authors include two different foci of commitment that are highly relevant to project teams: team commitment and project commitment. Their theory and findings show that propensity to trust and trustworthiness have a significant positive influence on team and project commitment and on the knowledge sharing climate and knowledge sharing behavior. The authors also posited that project and team commitment mediate the influence of the two trust-related constructs. This mediation was confirmed for project commitment, but not for team commitment; thus, project commitment, defined as a belief in the goals at hand and willingness to engage in the project turned out to be more crucial than team commitment, which did not mediate the influences of trust. The findings are in line with previous studies that have found trust to be a significant predictor of the sharing of tacit knowledge and add to the existing literature that project commitment is an important intervening variable for knowledge sharing in projects. The editor of this article was Hans Georg Gemünden. The second article is also on project teams. Amin Akhavan Tabassi, Kamand M. Roufechaei, Abu Hassan Abu Bakar and Nor’Aini Yusof address the theme: “Linking Team Condition and Team Performance: A Transformational Leadership Approach.” The authors argue that team building and team development can be studied as ongoing processes that are crucial to project success. Their analysis shows that the team condition, which is defined as the factors that contribute to making a great team, has significant direct and indirect impacts on team performance. The six factors of the team condition are (1) contribution, (2) communication, (3) responsibility and accountability, (4) experimentation and creativity, (5) conflict and competition, and (6) interpersonal relationships. The transformational leadership behavior of team leaders shows a mediating role between the team condition and the performance. The sample is taken from projects in the construction industry. In order to reduce the risk of common method variance, the research analysis was completed using 94 teams from three different sources, within which team members rated their leader’s transformational leadership behavior. The team leaders evaluated the team’s conditions, and, lastly, the supervisor of each team rated the team’s performance. The editor of this article was Hans Georg Gemünden. The third article by Marie Bengtsson and Lars Lindkvist, “Mapping the Road to Future Projects: Roadmapping as a Balancing and Transformation Process,” shows how roadmapping can bring about an increased focus on explorative activity and a stronger future orientation in an organization. Based on an exciting longitudinal case study in a large technology-based firm, this article documents that it may take two or more strategic initiative projects to change the direction of an organization. The first change project, a radical technology vision, presented in the first roadmapping attempt, contributed to creating an awareness of the value of looking long into the future. As this was far from sufficient, a second more bottom-up driven attempt with a stronger focus on collaboration and new knowledge generation was initiated to further the desired change over. Interestingly, the case study points to the significance of visualizations as a means to supporting knowledge generation, as well as protecting exploration. The editor of this article was Hans Georg Gemünden. The fourth article in this issue by Tristano Sainati, Naomi Brookes, and Giorgio Locatelli on “Special Purpose Entities in Megaprojects: Empty Boxes or Real Companies?” addresses infrastructure megaprojects, which typically cost more than US$1 billion and are characterized by vast impacts on the economy, society, and environment; long-term commitment; high involvement of public actors, such as governments, turbulent environment; significant risk for the sponsors; and high organizational complexity. Such megaprojects involve hundreds of companies. Although megaprojects are important for modern economies and societies, they have a history of poor performance. Some of the explanations lie in the inherent complexity, difficulty, and uncertainty of the megaproject endeavor; others refer to governance challenges like strategic misinterpretations of decision makers, cultural distance and lack of effective collaboration between project stakeholders; and poor front-end problem analysis, business planning, and engineering and design. The current article concentrates on the governance issue from a contracting perspective. One of the formal governance instruments, widely used in megaprojects, Project Management Journal, Vol. 44, No. 6, 2–5 © 2013 by the Project Management Institute Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/pmj.21383 First, I want to share some very good ews with the project management research community and all our readers interested in project manage ent research. The deadline for the submission of papers to the PMI research conference has been prolongated to 13 January 2014. The PMI® Research and Education Conference, “Standing on the Shoulders of Gia ts: In Search of Theory and Evidence” will be held on 27–29 July 2014 in Portland, Oregon, USA. We welcome co ceptual, empirical, or theoretical work using project, program, or portfolio a agement as the subject or context of the research. PMI also solicits papers and symposia on project management education; doctoral students are encouraged to submit their work to the pre-conference doctoral colloquium. For submission guidelines and instructio s, please contact PMI.org/REC2014submit. Confere ce registration is scheduled to open March 2014 and details can be found on PMI.org/REC2014. The Dece ber issue of Project Management Journal® offers a rich variety of articles, each of which delivers a significant contribution to theory building in project organizing and new empirical findings with a high value of theory and practice. The first paper by Dietrich, Kujala, a d Artto addresses a fundamental organizational design question in project management: How should the interdependencies between different teams in a multi-team project be managed? There are a y differe t coordination mechanisms, but each of them has its advantages and drawbacks and they can be combined in different ways, which differ in ter s of coherence and pote tial synergies. The organizational design reflections stated in this article can also be used for the manage e t of programs consisting of an array of different projects or for the management of a project portfolio in which the management of interdepende cies between projects is also a critical challenge. T e ma agement of inter ependencies between projects is an issue that has been neglected in multi-project management. Very often the interdependence is restricted to resource conflicts between projects and the solution is to identify the bottleneck resources and the projects that conflict with one bottleneck resource. The solution to this proble is often a muddling-through approach that delivers an immediate solution, yet doesn’t acknowledge that typically there are too many projects occurring at the same time, and that an organizatio usually experiences a number of bottlenecks simultaneously. This bottleneck obstacle makes it difficult to assess the consequences of measures that have been taken to repair an immediate problem—a proble that may only be a sympto of a much larger and obscure problem. In addition, there are many kinds of different interdependencies bet een projects that have not been addressed systematically and simultaneously. Markowitz’s pioneering work showed that the risk of a portfolio of projects can be reduced if the project portfolio mixture combines projects, which in sum show a smaller covariance of cash-flow. Thus, managing risk interdependencies between financial investments, which could have been projects, in such a way that the overall risk of a portfolio of financial investments, which could have been projects, is reduced, has been an essential element of designing portfolios since long. Organizational design theory made the claim that the kinds of inter ependencies atter; in other words, for pooled, sequential, or reciprocal interdependencies, different kinds of organizational coordination instruments—or more precisely, different ki ds of cohere t mixes f co rdination instruments—should be used. Regarding project portfolio management, pooled interdependencies among scarce (human) resources d ring the developme t stage of a new product, process, or service, have been the focus of interest. But pooled interdependencies are not restricted to human resources in the development process or to fina cial resources in a more aggregated view. If p tential users of a project can only cope with a limited a ount of new products or product releases that are delivered to them, this creates a new, thus far, often neglected type of bottle eck. The ability and willingness of users or i termediaries may also create bottle ecks and thus “pooled” interdependencies. Transfer prices or pri ritization systems have been proposed to solve the internal resource co rdination pr blem, but do they also apply to the customer acceptance bottleneck problem? Taking a marketing perspective or a purchasing erspective, ad itional interdependence aspects have to be considered. If two projects share the sa e customer as a recipient, or the same supplier as a source, then these two projects need to be coordinated. (This may pertain to the following questions: When should which project be done? What should