Ambiguity acceptance and translation skills in the project management literature

Abstract

Purpose The project management literature provides a fairly united picture of the importance of projects being successful. One success factor is represented by project managers themselves, whose personality, skills, knowledge, competencies, and traits affect project success. To better understand various project manager types, the purpose of this paper is to review the extant project management literature and propose a framework for categorising project managers based on the traits that they possess or lack. Design/methodology/approach The research commenced with identifying and collecting articles from the academic project management literature. The articles were then coded to identify different competencies and traits that a project manager needs to be successful. Based on this analysis, a framework with four main project manager types was developed. Findings The results indicate that ambiguity acceptance and translation skills are two important dimensions that project managers need to be successful. The four project manager types were arranged around two dimensions. Research limitations/implications The framework presented is based on previous research. Empirical testing of the proposed framework would be a promising direction for future research. Practical implications The framework assists reflective practitioners in identifying what kind of project manager they currently are, suggesting how they might transition into a different project manager type to increase their project management success rate. Originality/value This paper conceptualises project managers and how their personal traits relate to project success. It offers practical help to project managers in understanding their strengths and limitations, and how to become a different type of project manager.

The relative importance of a change agents’ competencies to project management approaches

“…We define flexibility as the ability to live in changing and ambiguous environments (Buckle & Thomas, 2003;Medina & Francis, 2015;Shao, 2018;Skulmoski & Hartman, 2010;Stevenson & Starkweather, 2017), skilfully dealing with uncertainty (Buckle & Thomas, 2003;Gray & Ulbrich, 2017), understanding that the end of the project is not always what was initially designed (Muller & Turner, 2010;Ochieng et al, 2013;Stevenson & Starkweather, 2017), with the result shown in Figure 10. The flexibility of the change agent may have presented the result with the greatest support in the literature, where the agile approach presented an overall result, attributing to this competence an essential factor and the predictive model of low importance, given the characteristics and assumptions of predictability of actions.…”

“…We define the ability to solve problems as the ability to analytically deconstruct and understand the problem with data and facts (Andoh-Baidoo et al, 2011), collecting information from different sources (Gray & Ulbrich, 2017), evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of each decision made (Muller & Turner, 2010;Skulmoski & Hartman, 2010). The results are shown in the Figure 12.…”

“…As reliability and professionalism, we understand how to establish a relationship of trust and respect with the team (Gray & Ulbrich, 2017;Medina & Francis, 2015;Pedrosa et al, 2018;Skulmoski & Hartman, 2010). Ethical integrity and professionalism contribute to building trust (Andoh-Baidoo et al, 2011;Smith et al, 2011), as does a sense of fairness (Ochieng et al, 2013).…”

Leader Tolerance of Ambiguity: Implications for Follower Performance Outcomes in High and Low Ambiguous Work Situations

“…Tolerance of ambiguity has attracted research from the fields of clinical psychology, medicine, economics, political science, organizational psychology (Furnham & Marks, 2013), and more recently, project management (Gray & Ulbrich, 2017). Despite this attention, there is little agreement on the definition and measurement of TOA.…”

A Importância Dos Soft Skills Nas Descrições Das Vagas De Gerente De Projetos De Ti

“…Os soft skills podem ser compreendidos como habilidades interpessoais (Bolli & Renold, 2015;Gray & Ulbrich, 2017;Skulmoski & Hartman, 2009). Já para Livesey (2017), soft skills são as habilidades que envolvem a gestão de pessoas.…”