Public Sector Project Manager Characteristics: Evidence from Portugal (2013)

RELEVANT LITERATURE AND HYPOTHESESIncreasingly, organizations in the public sector are utilizing projects to meet their structural and infrastructural developm ent obligations. Not unlike their manufacturing-, and service-oriented counterparts, public sector organizations are using projects to develop and improve their core competencies and practices. The external environment plays an important role in dictating resources, policies, and modes of operation of public sector organizations they tend to be more heavily influenced by external factors than private sector organizations. In most cases, the selection, funding, and execution of public sector projects are also subject to closer scrutiny by external stakeholders, which can include politicians, political watch groups and other interested members of the general public (Brunetto & Farr-Wharton, 2003; Khang & Moe, 2008). Concerning internal factors, the recent trend towards downsizing, rightsizing or reinventing government organizations and departments in combination with depressed economic activity and persistent government budget deficits, has increased the internal pressure on public sector project managers to make more effective use of their scarce project resources (Kamarck, 2007). One response to the adverse internal and external factors faced by public sector projects has been an increase in the usage of public/private partnership s to help fund and initiate desirable structural and infrastructural development projects that the public sector may be unable to finance (Manley, Shaw & Manley, 2007).Public projects are endeavors that have a limited life span and are, therefore, conducive to description in terms of a life -cycle process (Ng & Walker, 2008; Pinto & Slevin, 1988; Gransberg & Ellicott, 1997; Ika, 2009). There is general recognition that as a project moves through its various stages the project manager and senior management will need to refocus their attention, energy and resources to address the critical requirements of the new stage (Jiang & Heiser, 2004). Hence, project managers may be expected to display a changing variety of leadership and management skills as they guide the project through its various stages (Verma, 1996). The underlying life cycle model approach to be used in this study consists of the selection, planning, implementation and termination stages. However, our study will focus on the planning and implementation stages because many public sector project managers are assigned to a project after the project has been selected. Such project managers will only be directly involved with the project starting at the planning stage, however, they still bear the responsibility of becoming aware of the deliberations and actions taken during the selection stage.Project managers in the public sector may also have to deal with more constraints relative to their counterparts in the priva te sector. For example, public sector projects often involve collaborations between government, the private sector, other quasi-governmental agencies and national or international funding agencies and organizations each with their own peculiar objectives which may sometimes be conflicting (Torres & Pina, 2004). Furthermore, public sector projects may be complicated by the need to deal with serious internal issues such as entrenched bureaucracies and non-responsive employees. External constraints may include dealing with disgruntled or otherwise concerned citizens and stakeholders, and nontraditional operating constraints (Ward & Mitchell, 2004; Brown, 2001). Thus, managing projects in public sector environments often pose more serious challenges than managing equivalent projects in the private sector. It would be expected, therefore, that given the multifaceted nature of the issues surrounding public sector projects noted above, that there would be volumes of research studies on projects in the public sector. But this has not been the case. …