Ensaios sobre liderança e sucesso em projetos: revisão de literatura e evidências dos efeitos dos estilos transacional e transformacional sob mediação do autogerenciamento

Abstract

The adoption of project management has been consolidating in organizations over the last decades. In light of this reality, leadership stands out as one of the competencies that can positively contribute to project success. The literature has been addressing this relationship, aiming to observe the effects of leader styles and competencies on project success, and furthermore, to incorporate other factors that, together with leadership actions, may enhance the achievement of project success. Given the relevance of this topic, this thesis aims to analyze the impact of transactional and transformational leadership on the success of the project under the mediation of self-management and moderation of factors inherent to the project context. The first essay consists of a systematic literature review (SLR) aiming to explore how the relationship between leadership and project success is addressed in international literature. In total, 59 articles were selected, and the results revealed the prevalence of quantitative analyses using models to assess the leadership-project success relationship, incorporating moderating and mediating factors that can influence the impact of the leader's role in successful projects. Among other findings, the SLR also indicates that transformational and transactional leadership styles, along with leader competencies, are the most used approaches in the reviewed works. Considering the need to expand the range of factors explored in models analyzing the impact of leadership on project success, two additional empirical essays were developed. For this purpose, a survey was conducted to gather data on indicators related to project success, transformational and transactional leadership, and self-management. The latter construct emerges as an innovation in the tested models, as the self-regulatory characteristics of team members lack further investigation in the face of similar research already conducted. The total sample for this study comprised 406 project team members from the five regions of Brazil. Through structural equation modeling (SEM), the second essay of the thesis found a direct positive impact of transactional leadership on project success and an indirect impact through the self-management of team members. Additionally, in another novel finding for the field, a significant moderating effect was observed in the relationship between leadership and success in differentiated groups based on the project management approach used. It has been observed that, at higher levels of transactional leadership, the achievement of project success becomes more evident in teams that adopt agile and traditional approaches. Equally using SEM techniques, the third essay indicated a positive effect of transformational leadership on project success. This impact also occurs indirectly through the partial mediation of self-management. In this essay, the moderating effect was tested among groups divided by the form of work execution: onsite, telecommuting, and hybrid. The results revealed that higher levels of selfmanagement among team members working in a telecommuting format have a more pronounced impact on project success.