Toward a typological theory of project management

Abstract A traditional categorization of innovation as either incremental or radical has often been mentioned in the theoretical literature of innovation. A similar distinction has not become standard, however, in the project management literature and many publications on the management of projects tend to assume that all projects are fundamentally similar. In reality, however, projects exhibit considerable variation, and their specific management styles seem anything but universal. As a step towards the development of a project management theory, we present here a two-dimensional typology to define the wide spectrum of today's projects and their various management styles. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods and two data sets, we identify a set of ‘ideal types’ and real-world variants of these types. We show that the framework of this research can be subjected to quantitative modeling and rigorous empirical testing, and that it meets most of the criteria of a developed typological theory. Furthermore, such theory will particularly be useful in predicting the dependent variable — i.e. project effectiveness.