بررسی سه نوع ادراک مدیریت پروژه ساخت و ساز Three conceptual levels of construction project management work

Abstract The widespread use of project management standards for professional competence assessment and development is based on a rationalistic approach, whereby competence is seen as constituted by a pre-defined set of attributes in the form of knowledge topics. Yet little is known about whether and how these attributes are used by project managers in the workplace. In this paper we report an empirical exploration of project managers’ ways of conceiving and accomplishing their work. We follow Sandberg’s [Sandberg J. Human competence at work: an interpretative approach. Go¨teborg (Sweden): Bas; 1994; Sandberg J. Understanding human competence at work: an interpretative approach. Acad Manage J 2000;43(1):9–۲۵٫] phenomenographic study of automobile engine designers that found that the basic meaning structure of people’s conceptions of their work constitutes their competence at work. From our interviews with 30 project managers in UK construction firms, we identify three different basic conceptions of project management work. Each conception has a different main focus and a different set of key attributes that appeared to project managers when experiencing and accomplishing their work, reflecting a hierarchical arrangement of three distinctly different forms of project management competence. The findings offer an opportunity for a new approach to professional competence assessment and development that complements existing standards-based approaches. 2006Elsevier Ltd and IPMAAll rights reserved. Keywords: Project management competence; Standards; Conceptions; Phenomenography 1. Introduction The rapid rise of project management as a professional discipline has given rise to a number of well-established standards that define the scope of the discipline and describe its tools, techniques and concepts. These standards are now widely used for professional competence assessment, development and certification. They are based on the assumption that individuals who are able to demonstrate their understanding of the principles of project management embodied in the standards are deemed to be professionally competent as project managers. This follows a so-called rationalistic approach, whereby management competence is pre-defined as a specific set of knowledge areas independent of context and individual. Yet, little is known about whether and how these attributes are used by project managers in accomplishing their work. In the first part of this paper we review the two traditional approaches to researching and defining project management competence. We argue that the resulting project management standards do not actually capture project managers’ competence in the workplace. We find support for this position in empirical studies that have found no significant relationship between effective workplace performance and project management standards [1]. We suggest an alternative, interpretive approach developed by Sandberg [2,7] based on the principles of phenomenography, in order to explore practicing project managers’ ways of conceiving and experiencing their work and understand their competence at work. We describe the methods and results of our study of 30 project managers in the UK construction firms, and conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for practice and research. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 1234 751122; fax: +44 1234 751806. E-mail address: d.partington@cranfield.ac.uk (D. Partington). www.elsevier.com/locate/ijproman International Journal of Project Management 24 (2006) 412–۴۲۱ INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT 2. Theoretical background 2.1. Rationalistic approaches to competence at work There are two principal rationalistic approaches to studying competence at work, namely worker-oriented and work-oriented [2,3]. The worker-oriented approach takes the worker as the point of departure, and emphasises workers’ attributes such as knowledge, skills and abilities and personal traits [3]. Since different work requires different competences, the worker-oriented approach has been criticised as being too generic and context-independent [4]. In contrast, the work-oriented approach takes work as the point of departure, and treats work as existing independently of the worker, definable in terms of the technical requirements of work tasks [5]. Advocates of this approach argue that by identifying work activities that are central for accomplishing specific work and then transforming those activities into personal attributes, more concrete and detailed descriptions of competence can be generated, and thus the main problem of the over-generic worker-oriented approach can be largely overcome. However, it is difficult to transform descriptions of work activities into workers’ attributes, and it is questionable whether a list of work activities can be sufficient for indicating all the attributes required [6].