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Transformational leadership, flexibility and visibility improves project responsiveness to highly unpredictable and impactful events referred as the ‘black swans’ in mega projects (Bloch et al., 2012; Raziq et al., 2018; Zailani et al., 2016). However, these concepts have never been empirically tested in a single framework to determine their significant impact on multi-dimensional project success. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the interactional effects of project flexibility and project visibility on the relationship between transformational leadership and “multi-dimensions” of project success including meeting design goals; impact on customers and benefits to project-based organization.

Empirical data derived from cross-sectional survey of 160 project managers from telecom intensive companies in Pakistan were used to test the conceptual framework developed from recent literature. Partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) provided detailed analysis of the measurement and structural model. The most recent reflective–formative PLS-SEM approach for higher-order constructs has been introduced.

The results indicate that project managers’ transformational leadership (β = 0.348, p < 0.01), project flexibility (β = 0.221, p < 0.01) and project visibility (β = 0.366, p < 0.01) are positively related with the multi-dimensional project success (second-order formative) construct. Interestingly, the relationship between transformational leadership and project success is influenced by significantly negative moderations established through project flexibility (β = −0.100, p < 0.01) and project visibility (β = −0.093, p < 0.05).

This study in the telecom sector examined the interactional effects of risk mitigating strategies (i.e. project flexibility and project visibility) on the relationship between transformational leadership and multi-dimensional project success. This study creates a basis for future investigations extending to various project types and relevant to different industries especially those involving higher-order (formative) assessments of project success.

The study findings assist project leaders to meet their escalating commitments in achieving project success from a multi-dimensional standpoint. Additionally, this study underscores a renewed perspective of transformational leadership and project outcomes. Despite prevailing understanding developed through prior research, transformational leadership may become less favorable for project success in conditions of increased flexibility and visibility in projects.

Earlier studies have overlooked the multi-dimensional nature of project success (second-order formative) construct, despite several attempts to examine the interplay between transformational leadership and project success. Based on the knowledge gap and non-existence of empirical evidence, the authors introduced and empirically tested the moderating role of project flexibility and project visibility in the relationship between transformational leadership and multi-dimensional project success.

The purpose of this paper is to study project management performance measures by analyzing how training utility affects the relationships between mutual trust, social interaction and creativity as well as mutual trust, social interaction and flexibility in projects.

Using training utility and organizational support theory, eight hypotheses were developed. Responses from 279 project management professionals in the USA were collected. The hypotheses were then tested using partial least squares (PLS) and regression with the PROCESS macro approach.

The results suggests that the communication environment indeed has an important role in fostering creative and flexible project managers. Additionally, the study shows that organizations can actively improve the influence of the communication environment on project management creativity through training efforts. Interestingly, these findings may not hold for project manager flexibility.

In today's project management world, organizations need project managers who quickly adapt to changing project management scenarios. To do this, project managers need to be creative, generating new and novel ideas, as well as flexible when converting ideas into action. Organizations often possess large amounts of knowledge, and project managers rely on good communication practices to access this knowledge in response to the required changes in the project domain.

The study includes contributions to theory and empirical research in project management by analyzing the critical role training utility has on the firm communication environments and its outcomes. The study shows that organizations can take an active role by investing in resources to promote flexibility and creativity in projects.

The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of project management flexibility in early project phases on end-project performance including its mediating role on the effect of complexity over project performance.

Out of 13 hypotheses, 6 hypotheses regarding the relationships between areas of flexibility and project performance, 1 regarding the effect of complexity on performance and 6 other hypotheses regarding the mediating effect of six areas of flexibility were formulated. Statistical analysis was performed using partial least squares–structural equation modeling on data gathered from 111 surveys.

Research results revealed that flexibility of “how-attitude” and “how-organization” has positive significant effects on project performance. “How-attitude” contributes to the flexibility of project management processes by having an “open attitude,” “wide approach” and “proactive attitude” while “how-organization” put the emphasis of flexibility on “facilitate planning,” “outer organization” and “inner organization.” Moreover, this research confirmed that complexity has a negative effect on project performance. Among the six areas of flexibility, flexibility of “how-organization” mediates the effect of complexity on project performance.

The increased project complexity requires some degree of flexibility in project management to deal with project dynamics. However, whether such flexibility in early project phases has an effect on end-project performance has not been empirically investigated. This research contributes to filling the gap in literature about the relationship between project management flexibility and project performance. Such effect was investigated by studying the direct effect of flexibility on project performance and the mediating role of flexibility on the negative effect of project complexity on project performance.

Project ventures are an increasingly prevalent organizational form in many industries. The management literature has stressed their flexibility and adaptability advantages. This chapter focuses on the learning implications of the source of flexibility most essential to project ventures: the ability to switch partners during project formation and execution. This partnering flexibility creates opportunities to respond to new knowledge about characteristics of project tasks and project partners. Partnering flexibility, however, also creates learning challenges. The short-term nature of relationships between project partners and the disintegration of the project team after project completion challenges the accumulation and transfer of knowledge to future projects. Beyond the introduction of related learning opportunities and challenges, we identify potential contingency factors in the project context that shape when partner flexibility will have beneficial versus harmful effects. On the organizational level, we propose that project-governing permanent organizations can support project-venture learning. On the industry level, we highlight potential learning benefits of standardized partner roles and coordination practices. Thus, our chapter introduces a multilevel contingency framework for the evaluation of both learning opportunities and challenges of partnering flexibility in project-venture settings. We formulate testable propositions focused on partner-project fit and project performance.

The aim of the current study is to empirically assess the effects of organizational flexibility on project portfolio (PP) performance, with the mediating role of innovation and moderating effects of environmental dynamism (ED) and absorptive capability (AC).

Data were collected from 173 manufacturing firms and analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) with the help of a partial least squares (PLS) approach.

Results show that innovation partially mediates the relationship between organizational flexibility and PP performance. Furthermore, the moderating effect of ED between organizational flexibility and innovation was analyzed. Additionally, AC also observed as a moderator between innovation and PP performance.

Based on the resource-based view, this study contributes to the literature by addressing the roles of innovation, ED and AC in the relationship between organizational flexibility and PP performance. Implications for managers also discussed in the end; for example, to be more competitive, they should incorporate flexibility into the firm to encourage innovation. It also emphasizes to select new innovative opportunities that correspondingly have effects on the PP performance.

This study aims to investigate the influence of contractual flexibility on different types of conflict, determine if contractual flexibility is significantly correlated with project success between contracting parties, verify the mediating effect of project conflicts on the relationship between contractual flexibility and project success and examine the relationship between different types of conflicts and project success in megaprojects.

A theoretical model was developed and a structured questionnaire survey was conducted with 468 professionals. The structural equation modeling technique was used to analyze the data.

The results showed that both types of contractual flexibility – term and process flexibility – were correlated with and significantly positively affected project success, and term flexibility was found to have a greater influence. The introduction of project conflicts significantly weakened the relationship between contractual flexibility and project success, verifying the partial mediating effect of conflicts. All types of project conflicts play a destructive role in achieving project success; relationship conflict had the largest negative effect. Contractual flexibility affects two paths with respect to project success: the direct path (contractual flexibility → project success) and the indirect path (contractual flexibility → conflict → project success). The direct effect of contractual flexibility on project success is positive; the corresponding indirect effect is negative. The direct effect is greater than the corresponding indirect effect.

Different types of conflicts may mutually transform to extent certain degree. However, this study did not address the potential influence of conflict transformation on project success. The results implied that more emphasis should be placed on contractual terms, particularly on developing flexible terms in the contractual document, when implementing megaprojects. Meanwhile, this study reveals the effects of conflicts on project success in megaprojects, which provides a useful reference for project stakeholders to avoid the negative effect of conflicts.

This study provides a better understanding of the relationship between contractual flexibility, types of conflicts in megaprojects and a reliable reference for the project manager to effectively deal with these related issues. This implies the contracting parties strengthen communication and cooperation to establish a trust mechanism, while reducing the negative influence of project conflicts and enhancing the positive effect of contractual flexibility.

Few studies have investigated the effects of contractual flexibility on conflict and project success in megaprojects; this study contributes significant theoretical and practical insights to contract management and conflict management and provides a reliable reference to achieve project success.

The purpose of this study is to identify a typology of procurement contracts in the context of software development projects that allows firms to align design flexibility with design uncertainty at the project level. The theoretical lenses of contract theory and software engineering are used to explain why the five archetypes in the proposed typology provide gradually increasing levels of design flexibility and to develop hypotheses about the associations between design flexibility and a set of project cost dimensions.

The hypotheses are tested with objective contractual data from 270 software development contracts entered into by a leading international bank over a period of three years.

Data analysis confirms the existence of the proposed typology and shows that design flexibility is negatively associated with control and positively associated with coordination, trust, duration and price.

Although the findings are based on the contracting practices of a single, albeit sophisticated, organization, they shed light on the ability of firms to align flexibility with uncertainty at the onset of new projects by taking advantage of nuanced contractual mechanisms to produce a broader set of contractual archetypes.

This paper is the first in the outsourcing literature to analyze a nuanced contractual typology in software development projects through the perspectives of both contract theory and software engineering.

Prior literature provides little insight on how management control systems have responded to the growth of collaborative new product development (NPD). The purpose of this paper is to contrast the use of budgets to manage collaborative and in-house NPD and to consider the implications for enabling flexibility.

The paper reports on the findings of a case study company in the medical devices industry that uses two different business models for its NPD activities. While the company engages in in-house NPD for its own products, it also engages in collaborative NPD services with a range of customers.

The study illuminates how two types of budgets (annual and project) can have very different impacts on flexibility under different business models. The annual financial budgets imposed rigid constraints on in-house NPD and resulted in reduced flexibility, whereas in collaborative NPD, they had little impact on flexibility. Project budgets created hard operational constraints in collaborative NPD which generated a highly pressurised yet highly creative environment, whereas project budgets had little impact on flexibility in in-house NPD.

The study contributes detailed empirical insights into the control systems used to manage collaborative NPD from the supplier perspective, where creativity is largely responsive and contrasts these with the management of in-house NPD where creativity is largely expected. The authors also contribute an analysis of the key control systems and other factors that sustain flexibility in this highly pressurised open innovation environment.

The risks and uncertainties of public–private partnership (PPP) projects threaten their sustainability. Contract flexibility, which is based on the theory of incomplete contract and transaction cost, may be a viable solution to this issue. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between contract flexibility and the sustainability performance of PPP projects. The multiple mediating roles of justice perception and cooperation efficiency are assessed, thereby allowing the pathways and conditions to be understood more comprehensively for improving the sustainability performance of PPP projects.

Nine hypotheses in the proposed research model are tested via structural equation modeling using data acquired from 218 Chinese PPP professionals.

Results show that contract flexibility positively affects PPP project sustainability performance. Justice perception and cooperation efficiency play direct and sequential mediating roles in this effect.

This study validates that contract flexibility positively impacts the sustainability performance of PPP projects, where justice perception and cooperation efficiency serve direct and sequential mediating roles. The findings of this study contribute to an improved understanding of the effect of contract flexibility on the sustainability performance of PPP projects. Furthermore, they provide important theoretical and practical insights into contract management as well as beneficial information and valuable initiatives for improving the sustainability of PPP projects.

Flexibility is known as an important term in the field of open buildings especially during modern era. Idea of flexibility has been one of the prominent implications in traditional Iranian architecture emerged in spatial organizations. Although, during modern period this quality of spaces has been mostly ignored some of the contemporary architects attempted to reconsider this characteristic in their projects. However, providing an interview with 7 pioneering contemporary Iranian architects and visiting their 25 residential projects it seems that flexibility has been reinterpreted in some of their projects. This research is an attempt for examining the idea of flexibility in 6 projects of 3 of these architects who were obsessed with this spatial term in their architectural works. Based on the architect’s words and analysis of their projects, and also looking for the roots of flexibility in traditional architecture, it can be asserted that there is an authentic emergence of flexibility in these projects. Examining these projects according to three main indicators of flexibility in modern architecture as structural systems, service organization and architectural layout, it is also tried to find their relation with traditional architecture. Being adapted with new lifestyles while ingrained in cultural and environmental issues of its context, idea of flexibility employed as an authentic characteristic of spatial configuration in some of the contemporary buildings in Iran.