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Leadership Substitutes and Personality Impact on Time and Quality in Virtual New Product Development Projects

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Abstract

Leadership, personality, and organizational factors were analyzed to measure their combined effect on virtual-based product development time and scope-quality performance. Over 1,000 team members were surveyed. MANCOVA was used to test if leadership, personality project, and/or organizational factors impacted performance. All realistic factors were included to detect leadership substitutes moderation, mediation, and prediction. Bias was reduced by not surveying leaders, by using reverse item coding, and by checking social desirability. Experimental control and common method variance were managed by including multilevel and multisource data. Performance was objectively computed from organizational data. The findings were that transactional leadership (not transformational) and some personality attri-butes (leader substitutes) were significant factors, increasing project scope quality and time performance. This article was published online on September 29, 2010. An error was subsequently identified. This notice is included in the online and print versions to indicate that both have been corrected. See the correction noted on the seventh page of the print version of the article.
Paper
Kenneth David Strang
Article first published online: 29 SEP 2010
DOI: 10.1002/pmj.20208
© 2010 Project Management Institute
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Project Management Journal
Early View (Articles online in
advance of print)
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APPC Research, Long Island, NY, USA; State University of New York, NY, USA; University
of Technology and Telstra Learning-in-Business, Sydney, Australia
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Leadership substitutes and personality impact on time and quality in virtual
new product development projects
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Keywords: virtual product development; transformational transactional leadership; leadership substitutes; personality; competencies;
time performance; scope quality
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Kenneth David Strang
Abstract
Leadership, personality, and organizational factors were analyzed to measure their combined effect on virtual-based product development time and scope-quality performance. Over
1,000 team members were surveyed. MANCOVA was used to test if leadership, personality project, and/or organizational factors impacted performance. All realistic factors were
included to detect leadership substitutes moderation, mediation, and prediction. Bias was reduced by not surveying leaders, by using reverse item coding, and by checking social
desirability. Experimental control and common method variance were managed by including multilevel and multisource data. Performance was objectively computed from
organizational data. The findings were that transactional leadership (not transformational) and some personality attri-butes (leader substitutes) were significant factors, increasing
project scope quality and time performance.
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