Paper Summary-Week 5 Jack Tong

Paper: Langer, N., Slaughter, S.A. and Mukhopadhyay, T., 2014. Project managers’ practical intelligence and project performance in software offshore outsourcing: A field study. Information Systems Research, 25(2), pp.364-384.

Practice intelligence is the ability to resolve project related work problems that are unexpected and can not be resolved by established processes and frameworks. This study examines the role of project manager’s practical intelligence in the performance of software offshore outsourcing projects. The authors posit that project managers could apply practical intelligence to effectively address and resolve unexpected incidents, and therefore the level of practical intelligence positively affects project performance. The authors further theorize that project complexity and familiarity contribute to its information constraints and the likelihood of critical incidents in a project, thereby moderating the relationship between practical intelligence and project performance.

The authors explore the research question by analyzing a detailed longitudinal data that record project and personnel level activities on 530 projects completed by 209 project managers. The authors employ the critical incidents methodology to assess the practical intelligence of the project managers who led these projects. The authors consider several factors that influence task complexity and requires different level of practical intelligence such as Technological Complexity (Software size and schedule compression), Organization Complexity (team size and team dispersion), and Task familiarity. The findings indicate that project managers’ practical intelligence has a significant and positive impact on project performance (cost performance and client satisfaction). Further, projects with higher complexity or lower familiarity benefit even more from project managers’ practical intelligence.