Servant Leadership and Project Success in Megaprojects: Examining the Roles of Effective Project Governance and Trust

Abstract

The increasing number of projectification indicates that projects are playing very key role in the economy of nation as they are costing very high amount of investment. Besides huge investment megaprojects are also influencing the lives of people and environment. However, practitioners and scholars are still facing difficulties in improving project results and long term benefits, which is projects mostly over budgeted, missing time frame and also impacting the quality of works. To a great extent the failure of the project is the failure of the project management theory, and practitioners are trying to recognize them by providing best theoretical foundation to substitute the obsolete one. People-oriented leadership tends to be more effective in improving culture of trust in project success. Despite the rich literature on project success, however, there is limited work on the role of leadership in project success.Accordingly, this research aimed to investigate how servant leadership can play role in enhancing trust in team members thus influencing the project success in megaprojects. Drawing on social exchange theory, we proposed trust in team members as an underlying mechanism in the relationship between servant leadership and project success. Trust in an organization is considered to be very fundamental in workplace environment, organizations invest on building effective relationship in between the leaders employee's relationship that improves culture, workplace ethics and overall productivity. We introduce effective project governance as a moderator in servant leadership—trust relationship. A cross sectional study was conducted and data was collected from 251 project workers mainly project managers, construction managers and project team members. Data was analyzed using Hayes PROCESS macro. The mediation results illustrated that trust fully mediates the servant leadership project success relationship. We also found that effective project governance moderates the servant leadership trust relationship. The present study contributes to the existing literature by suggesting that the servant leadership and effective project governance can enhance the trust in team members which ultimately translates to project success. It is hoped that this study will create more awareness among project management practitioners and lead towards better relationship between leaders and their followers. This study has several theoretical and practical implications for the professionals working on mega projects who are striving to achieve project success.