Research On The Relationship And Effect Mechanism Of Leadership And Followership Of Project Managers

Leaders and leadership are usually understood as the core of social management and have always been the focus of research.Whether in academic and social practice,due to overemphasizing the importance of leaders,most of the followers and their followership are often ignored.With the development of IT technology,flat management system has been widely used in modern organizations.Because of the blurry of organizational hierarchy,followers become the basic part of the organization.However,the success of an organization requires a large number of interconnected units,followers can not simply follow the chain of command,followers’ performance determines the effectiveness of leaders.Followership is the free will recognition of leadership in the commitment towards realization of the collectively adopted organization vision and culture.In most organizations today,project managers are both leaders and followers.However,the past research focused more on the leadership role of the project manager.Although effective leadership cannot be achieved only by relying on the leadership of the project manager,the followership is the key factor for the success of leadership,and the effective combination of leadership and followership can be more effective.The purpose of this dissertation was to identify the relationship between project managers’ leadership and their followership.Most project managers are both leaders and followers at the same time,but research typically investigates only their leadership.This ignores followership as an important aspect in understanding and predicting behavior,and further in the selection of project managers.This research adopted the research method of both qualitatice analysis and quantitative analysis,logical deduction and systematic induction,and the combination of theoretical research and empirical analysis.Based on the relationship between project manager’s leadership and followership,this research explored the selection strategy of project manager,gets through the all-round perspective of leadership and followership,and discussed the interaction relationship among leadership,followership and project effectiveness,so as to provide strategies for improving project output and efficiency.First of all,according to literature research and interviews,on the basis of Defee’s followership model,this dissertation constructed the followership questionnaire based on the perspective of transcation and transfromation.Through the national-wide survey of project managers,the followership and leadership samples of project managers were obtained.Through the research,we found that the factors of leadership and following ability of project managers in China were not the same as those of American project managers,and the main sources of change were differences in culture and habits.Then,based on the new structure of leadership and followership,Canonical Correlation Analysis was used to measure the strength of the relationship between leadership factors and followership factors.The results show that the difference of leadership behavior caused by following ability is small and should be ignored,which is significantly smaller than that caused by leadership.It shows that leadership has a greater impact on followership,and leadership reflects a person’s personality more than followership.In contrast,the followership is less related to personality,because it is constrained by the superior,so a person’s followership has less influence on the leadership.Further,through the analysis of the mechanism of project manager’s leadership on followership,it is found that transformational leadership has a positive impact on transformational followership,while transcational leadership has a negative impact on transactional followership.There was no significant influence on the results of correlation of the variable such as the project manager’s position,length of service and project effect.However,gender and organizational type have a certain control effect on the relationship.For gender differences,women are relatively "flexible",while men are relatively "self".It can be shown that women are more willing to adapt to the needs of their organization,team or work,so they are more willing to make changes to adapt to the environment for their own leadership habits in the work,so that their leadership has less impact on the followership.Relatively speaking,male project managers may be more in line with their own personality or habits,the organizational environment and team members have less influence on them,so that the leadership they cultivate or show in the organization has a greater impact on their followership.According to the division of inside and outside the system,the extra responsibilities of project managers within the system are more flexible,and their willingness to cooperate is negatively affected by passive management,while necessary communication is relatively rigid;while the performance of extra responsibilities of project managers outside the system should be determined according to the environment and atmosphere,while the necessary communication is negatively affected by passive management.Through system dynamics simulation,it can be seen that the improvement of project effect can be done by setting higher project effect objectives,at the same time,it can also be improven by setting the leadership and followship role model of the project manager,which improves the project effect by learning from the excellent role model of the project manager.Both are useful ways,but the effect of role models is slightly greater than the effect of the target.At the same time,the project effect and model learning will work together on improvement of the most of the leadership and followership dimensions,and the learning effect of model is greater than the effect of project target.The lower project goal will restrain the dimensions from approaching to the role model,while the higher project effect goal will accelerate the approaching to the role model.And when we only rely on the lower project targert effect,there will be the unstable wave phenomenon of project effect,leadership and followership.This research results suggest that a full behavior model consisted by both leadership and followership should be considered.The traditional distinction between leadership and followership is no longer evident as boundaries have become increasingly blurred(Burke,2009).Sine leadership can affect the followership,for superior seeking a specific follower,candidates can be chosen by their leadership style.From the result that followership has little effect on leadership,the traditional way of promoting people based on their followership style and competence may be invalid.