Study On The Influence Of Project Manager's Overconfidence On The Innovation Of IS Project

IS(Information System)project's development and management is complex and difficult,though we strengthen the demand analysis,change management,project organization and other aspects,the project still fail.We find that innovation is a critical factor for the success of IS projects.As the key person of IS project's implementation,project managers need to do a good job in a series of innovative activities,their attitude towards innovation will directly affect the innovation consciousness and behavior of the team members.However,the project manager is not entirely rational,he will have cognitive biases,overconfidence is one of the cognitive biases and it is common.Because of overconfidence,the project manager is likely to affect the decision-making and behaviors of others.Therefore,the influence of project manager's overconfidence on the innovation of IS project can not be ignored.Based on the researches of overconfidence and innovation,we selected three different types of IS project manager's overconfidence,including better-than-average,self-attribution bias and Illusion of control.We analyzed the relationship between overconfidence and IS project's innovation with top management support as the intermediary.Then we constructed the research model and raised the theoretical hypothesis.We collected data through questionnaire,used SPSS19.0 and Smart PLS2.0 software to analysis them,tested whether the theory model supposed was reasonable.Then we modified the model according to the results of the empirical analysis.Finally,we established an innovation game model based on the overconfidence of the project manager using the principal-agent theory and game theory to analyze the innovation behavior of overconfident IS project manager.Moreover,we found the threshold of the positive and negative impact of overconfidence on innovation.By the above analysis,this paper got the following main conclusions:better-than-average and self-attribution bias of IS project manager positively affect top management support,which also positively affect innovation with the mediation of top management support,but they do not have direct significant impact on innovation.Illusion of control not only affects innovation positively and directly but also positively affect innovation with the mediation of top management support.In the innovation game model,when the IS project manager's level of overconfidence is greater than the impact of top managers' supervision on his expected payoff,the project manager will blindly innovate and have a negative impact,so we think that the level of project manager's overconfidence should less than or equal to the impact of top managers' supervision on his expected payoff.The results of this paper not only enrich the theoretical basis of overconfidence,but also provide a reference for improving the success rate of IS project implementation.