Week 7_Langer et al. (2014)_Xinyu Li

In this paper, Practical Intelligence (PI), a concept from cognitive psychology as a supplement of academic intelligence, is proposed to be a critical factor for Project Managers (PM) to make their projects successful in software offshore outsourcing. Based on an information processing perspective, the paper posits that the PMs’ PI is positively related to project performance. Meanwhile, it also hypothesize that the PI-performance relationship is positively moderated by project characteristics categorized as project complexity (software size and schedule compression) and team complexity (team size and team dispersion), and negatively moderated by task familiarity (PM-task familiarity and team-task familiarity) and stakeholder familiarity (team member familiarity and PM-client familiarity).

This research adopts a mixed methodology to conduct empirical analyses. It obtains PI data of 209 PMs in a software service company through case studies, combined with dataset from the company’s archive data containing characteristics for each of the PMs and the projects they led. Proposed moderators are derived from the dataset using different analytic tools and models. The dependent variable project performance is measured separately by cost performance and client satisfaction.

The results from an OLS and SUR model verify the main effect of PI on project performance as well as most of the moderating effects. With certain limitation such as a progressive learning bias of PI, the paper contributes to related literature by 1) introducing and conceptualizing PI as an important capability for PMs, 2) identifying the characteristics of project context that moderate the PI effect on project performance, and 3) providing sufficient empirical evidence.