MEASURING THE IMPACT OF IT PROJECT MANAGER’S COMPETENCIES ON TEAM COMMITMENT

Due to the fundamental role of project managers, this paper aims the answer the following question: “Which IT project manager’s competencies impact on team commitment the most?” To answer this question our main goal was to identify what are the main IT project manager competencies that build and sustain team commitment in IT settings. We conducted a survey with professionals who work in IT projects and we obtained 484 valid responses. On the sequence, we performed Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to test the model with PLS. Our findings suggest that the competencies that impact team commitment the most are the ones related to team management, project management and personal characteristics. Research findings can help organizations to develop their recruiting and assessing process for project managers as well to structure specific training, coaching and mentoring programs. Results can raise questions such as: how to measure cognitive and relational abilities such as negotiation, conflict management, ability to motivate people in professionals? How can a recruiter verify if a candidate has not only the necessary technical skills but also needed level of emotional intelligence? Certainly, it is necessary to combine knowledge and techniques from different disciplines such as psychology, project management, sociology and others to design better procedures to recruit and assess IT project managers. A limitation of this study was not differentiating traditional project teams from virtual teams. It is worthy assessing the relevance of virtual team competencies on global project settings.