Investigating The Key Characteristics Of Project Managers’ Leadership Style In Engineering Corporations

In China, engineering corporations is the first to adpot project management, and comparatively, they do better in project management. However, there is nearly no investigations about the leadership style of project managers in these corporations, and no reliable standards about how to choose or appoint a project manager.This paper studied the theories about leadership style and project manager leadership style carefully, including their definitions, development histories, influence factors, classifications and effects. And it also studied the literature about engineering corporations, and concluded their characteristics. Then the author analyzed above results, and picked up five kinds of leadership style from current leadership style categories which are fit for project managers in engineering corporations. However, they were not completely opposite or independent with each other, but overlapped to some extent. So this paper disassembled the five leadership styles, and grouped them into five dimensions, and then the Project-typed Leadership Style(PLS) Model was set up that fit the project managers in engineering corporations. It’s comprised of five dimensions that are also its key characteristics:Personal Charm (PC), Vision Stimulation (VS), Process Democracy (PD), Result-Oriented (RO) and Relationship Support (RS).After the model was set up, the author designed the Project-typed Leadership Style (PLS) Questionnaire and did the pre-investigation, then adjusted the questionnaire to the final formal questionnaire. It was issued to project managers or project members in engineering corporations via face-to-face or Internet. Finally,123 pieces of useful data were gathered.The results of data analysis verifiedthe theory model in this paper, and some conclusions were draw as follows:1. The five dimensions plays different roles in Project-typed Leadership Style.2. Project-typed Leadership Style and its five dimensions have correlations with project success, that is to say they are helpful to improve the project success level. However, totally speaking, these correlations are not so close. And relatively, the correlation between Project-typed Leadership Style and project success is the closest, and the correlation between Personal Charm (PC) and project success is the second closest, while the correlation between Result-Oriented (RO) is the weakest.3. Project-typed Leadership Style also has positive correlation with project time, and helpful to short the project duration. But it has no correlation with project cost and complete rate. Its five dimensions also have no correlations with project time, cost and complete rate.Finally, this paper proposed some management advices, pointed out the disadvantages and directed the future investigations.