The role of the project manager’s transformational leadership style in motivating the construction site team

Abstract

Construction projects require the combined effort of professionals from different firms and different backgrounds in order to achieve success. This, in turn, is hard to materialize without the efforts and skills of project management professionals working as part of each of such concerned firms. Participants of the construction project setting are diverse and of various backgrounds, they invest in their skills for temporary basis with the aim of reaching a common goal. The contracting firm’s site team is the largest of all the other teams assigned to the construction site. While this team’s project manager reports to his-her corresponding head-office function (i.e. operations), the members of the other site-office units and their tiers of subordinates report to both the project manager’s office on site and to the counterpart units at the firm’s head office. The objective of this study is to examine the applicability of motivation theories in relation to enhancing the ability of the project manager to exercise a transformational leadership style. More specifically, the aim is to investigate whether (a) it is possible for transformational leadership to exist in such a short-lived temporary project organization, given the various existing constraint, and (b) there exists a link between the project manager’s transformational leadership style and the construction site personnel’s motives, in a way that improves their work efficiency and influences their career path development.