Matching Leadership Style to Project Context: Exploring Contextual Factors Affecting Project Managers' Leadership Style

Abstract

Achieving project success is of vital importance for project owner organizations in implementing strategic objectives and supporting overall company development. The project managers’ leadership style is a critical factor in project success. Several previous studies (Müller & Turner, 2007; Yang et al., 2013; Tabassi et al., 2016; Bhatti et al., 2021) have analyzed the relationship between project managers’ leadership styles and project performance. Most of these studies have reinforced the general view that an appropriate leadership style facilitates successful project completion (Muller & Turner, 2007; Yang et al., 2013; Tabassi et al., 2016). However, there is no single best leadership behavior, as the effectiveness of a project manager’s leadership style depends on the characteristics of the project and its organizational context. Bearing this in mind, several researchers (Müller & Turner, 2010; Raziq et al., 2018; Kabore, Sane & Abo, 2021; Nauman et al., 2022) have analyzed the relationship between leadership style and project success in a more context-related manner, taking into account various project and organizational attributes. Nevertheless, these studies often differ significantly in the range of attributes they analyze and in how they conceptualize these contextual factors, leading to notable limitations. To identify the appropriate leadership style for project managers in different project contexts, there is a need to establish a comprehensive framework that includes the fundamental characteristics of both the project and its organizational context. This study provides a systematic review of project management literature, focusing on the relationship between project managers’ leadership styles, attributes of project context, and project success. Our findings reveal a lack of comprehensive, context-related studies in this field. Therefore, further research is needed to highlight key project and organizational characteristics that affect the identification of appropriate leadership styles by means of deductive reasoning.