Project Managers as Senior Executives

How the Research Was Conducted

Russell D. Archibald, PhD (Hon), Msc, PMP, Jean-Pierre Debourse, PhD, MPM

• Publisher: Project Management Institute
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781935589266
• eBook ISBN:
  9781628250268
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Are project managers becoming senior executives? This research provides documented answers based on published and empirical evidence.

Project Managers as Senior Executives maps out a model for advancement for program and project managers and contributes new thinking on the emerging leadership of project managers as senior executives. The research is published in two volumes. Volume I—Research Results, Advancement Model, and Action Proposals presents the results and proposals from the study and Volume 2—How the Research Was Conducted: Methodology, Detailed Findings, and Analyses contains the research-oriented materials from the study.

This book is for:

• Project managers seeking career advancement
• Senior executives interested in developing project management talent
• Project management professionals and researchers

CHAPTER 9

Theoretical Foundations

(Note: Professor Philippe Paillot is the author of this chapter.)

9.1 Senior Executives and Project Manager Similarities and Differences

9.1.1 The Characteristics of Senior Executives

As suggested by Barabel and Meier (2006), the manager's job can be understood through the analysis of their roles (related to the requests of the organization) or their key skills needed to effectively play these roles.

9.1.1.1. Roles Typologies

9.1.1.1.1 Static Typologies

9.1.1.1.1.1. Classical approaches. Historically, the original concepts of the manager's roles are connected to Fayol (1916), Koontz and O'Donnell (1923), Mooney and Reiley (1931), Gulick (1937), and Barnard (1938). This school can be qualified as classical, since it considers the manager's work as a management process including planning, organizing, controlling, coordinating, and commanding; these principles can be compared to a support frame to managing process (Boisvert, 1980). In this regard, Fayol, after serving as a managing director in a French mining company for many years, is the first person to clearly express the definition of the general manager's role. The general manager:

• plans,
• organizes,
• coordinates,
• commands, and
• controls.

Mooney and Reiley (1931), both directors at General Motors, identified four major principles of organization:

1. Coordination principle—based on authority laid on moral rights.
2. Hierarchical principle—defining the lines of authority in the organization.
3. Functional principle—gathering specialized tasks within functions.
4. Staff and line principle—defining two types of authority: counseling and binding. This is a real contribution from these authors as compared to Fayol (1916).

Gulick (1937) introduced a sixth role (adding to the five listed in the previous paragraph) in breaking down the “command” function into two distinct activities: staff and management. Boisvert (1980, p. 41) summarized the logic model underlying Urwick's (1943) work as follows:

Management Principles
Principle	Process	Effect
Investigating	Forecasting	Planning
Acting appropriate	Organizing	Coordinating
Ordering	Commanding	Controlling

The classical school contribution to understanding the manager's job should not be neglected. Fayol (1916) defined 14 principles that guide all the processes of management (to plan, to organize, etc.):

1. Division of work
2. Authority and responsibility
3. Discipline
4. Unity of command
5. Unity of direction
6. Subordination of the individual's interests to the general interest
7. Remuneration of personnel
8. Centralization
9. Scalar chain (line of authority)
10. Order
11. Equity
12. Stability of tenure of personnel
13. Initiative
14. Esprit de corps

Obviously, some things have changed since 1916, and if the five components of the process of management seem eternal, some principles are dated.

The classical school is nevertheless in a structural-functionalist reading of the organization where individuals occupy social positions carrying normative frameworks that assign them functional tasks. The manager's job description given by this school deals with normative expectations and expressions that dictate his or her own managerial conduct and behaviors apart from the contingent requirements of the organizational contexts. For this school, the manager's task is primarily seen in a formal perspective. Rojot (2003) recalled that an implicit principle underlies the application of these theories: the idea that it is possible to find an organizational pattern that is best in all circumstances and that it is possible to delete any contradictions and conflicts between stakeholders of this organization. The question is whether the manager's rational model allows us to understand the role of the manager. As mentioned by Watson and Harris (1998) and Laroche (2000), the list of functions, activities, roles, and occupations found in literature is nothing remarkable or specific to managers. Besides, issues relating to the analysis and transformation of the firm (i.e., Santos and Eisenhardt, 2005; Baudry and Dubrion, 2009) seem hard to integrate in the reductionist, monolithic, and normative reading of functions and roles of top managers proposed by the classical school, which does not suggest any contingent and contextualized understanding of managerial functions.

9.1.1.1.1.2. Multi-polar typologies. Mintzberg (1973) questioned the classical school's typologies. Considering they are not sufficiently oriented towards action, they are too abstract to be of any use. Mintzberg attacked the four myths:

1. The manager is a reflective, systematic planner. In fact, study after study shows that managers work at an unrelenting pace, that their activities are characterized by brevity, variety, and discontinuity, and that they are strongly oriented to action and dislike reflective activities.
2. The effective manager has no regular duty to perform. In fact, in addition to handling exceptions, managerial work involves performing a number of regular duties, including ritual and ceremony, negotiations, and processing of soft information that links the organization with its environment.
3. The senior manager needs aggregated information, which a formal management information system best provides. In fact, managers strongly favor the oral media, namely telephone calls and meetings.
4. Management is, or at least is quickly becoming, a science and a profession. Isn't this also a question that concerns the project management professional bodies? In fact, the manager's programs and agenda—scheduling time, processing information, making decisions, etc.—remain locked deeply inside their brains.

Mintzberg (1973) described the manager's job in terms of various roles or organized sets of behaviors identified with a position. He distinguished 10 roles classified into four categories and an integrated job.

1. The formal roles:
   • Authority and status.
2. The interpersonal roles:
   • The manager is a figurehead.
   • The leader role.
   • The liaison role, by contacts outside his or her vertical chain of command.
3. The informational role:
   • The manager must be a monitor.
   • The disseminator role consists of sharing and distributing much of his information.
   • The role of spokesperson, outside his or her unit and towards the main stakeholders.
4. The decisional roles:
   • As an entrepreneur, the manager aims to improve his or her unit, to adapt it to changing conditions in the environment. In this context, he is a project developer.
   • The disturbance handler role shows the manager involuntary responding to pressures.
   • The resource allocator.
   • The negotiator.

The integrated job: The 10 roles are not easily separable. They form a gestalt, an integrated role. They all have their importance in the success of a manager.

Minztberg proposed that differences in managerial work involve the relative importance of the roles across hierarchical level and functional specialty. For example, the CEO focuses considerable attention on external roles (i.e., liaison, spokesperson, figurehead) that link the environment with the organization.

At lower levels of organization, however, work is more focused, more short term in outlook, and the characteristics of brevity and fragmentation are more pronounced. In the same vein, Alexander (1979), Paolillo (1981), and Pavett and Lau (1983) underlined a form of contingency of the roles depending on the hierarchical level of the managers.

In this viewpoint, Declerck, Debourse, and Navarre (1983) defined the main roles of a CEO by the following elements:

• The CEO is a point of reference; an anchor in a world of discontinuities and turbulences; a strong point for the members of the company. He or she makes it easier to know how to behave and to act in any circumstance.
• The CEO has to give meaning to the actions of the members of the company. This is a powerful means of motivation: knowing why people act and knowing that to act is valuable. Action is an important part of the sense of life, and the sense of life is often obtained by action.
  The meaning of action is a strong force against the existential vacuum, and Nietzsche's famous sentence explains it perfectly: “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost anyhow.”
  Let's not forget Hannah Arendt's (1958) great wording attesting that those who survived the extreme conditions of the German concentration camps, especially Auschwitz, were those who could give a meaning to this life.
• According to Foucault (1961), the CEO is inside of the outside and outside of the inside. That is to say that the CEO is, and must be, both in the company and in its environment, like Janus Bifrons, a bow towards the company (the city) and a bow towards the environment (the outside).
  The number of failures from the companies managed by CEOs who were strongly involved in a star or celebrity system was appreciably higher than normal. Perhaps also, for these CEOs, being a star is a way to make up for a managerial inadequacy and for an internal failure.
• The CEO is a maker of reality. For humans reality does not exist per se. They work with models of reality. For instance, the automotive industry is a convenient model representing millions and millions of different cars. The model is a practicable way to deal with a complex reality.
  Humans construct their reality, i.e., they construct models that after perception and internationalization, allow one to understand multiple elements and which of them will be useful as a guide for action. This is the condition for transcending the firm-environment dichotomy.
  If the CEO is too much inside the Company, in its “Ivory Tower”, he ignores the environment and the evolutions of the world; he ignores the external evolutions bearing opportunities or threats for his Company and the ensuing problems in understanding and carrying on the necessary changes and internal evolutions.
  If the CEO is too much in the environment, and sometimes too much in the star system, he or she will be less involved in the company and less motivated for it; the real life of the company and its members may be forgotten. This can lead to a failure to recognize the needs of the company and often a loss of credibility and of legitimacy. This has been observed.
  A leader is the one who perceives and understands reality; this grasp of reality is what brings that person authority. This implies the perception of internal and external phenomena, their modeling, and their communication.
  Obviously different people in a variety of positions have their own model of reality (senior management, shareholders, shop floor, unions, consultants, etc.). These models could be in competition and the struggle for power is always present.
  It is the role of a CEO to have a good model of reality and to analyze it critically. By conviction, by negotiation, and sometimes by power and strength, the CEO has to define a reality for the company, to diffuse it through the company, to accept the possibility that it will be called into question, and to govern the relevance of the answers of the company to the evolution of the environment.
  A good model of reality, well shared by people, is a strong factor in cohesiveness and of the capacity of adaptation of a company.
• The CEO has to pay attention to weak signals.
  The reality to be defined, facing the actions and reactions of the company, does not necessarily correspond to the facts, ideas, and events dominating at the moment.
  Igor Ansoff (1965) showed the importance of the weak signals for the formulation and the implantation of a strategy and for those who caught those signals and their resulting competitive advantage.¹
  The important facts are facts bearing ruptures and mutations. These facts are rarely evident or dominating. They are often less predictable, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Brief Executive Summary of the Research
• Chapter 8—Research Study Background
• Chapter 9—Theoretical Foundations
• Chapter 10—Senior Executives and Project Management: Observations from their Biographies
• Chapter 11—Research Study Methodology
• Chapter 12—Findings from the Face to Face Interviews
• Chapter 13—Findings from the Questionnaires: Characteristics of the Respondents and of Project Management within their Organizations
• Chapter 14—The Respondents’ Career Paths Observed
• References
• Brief Bios of Co-Authors
• Appendices—For On-Line Access