Leadership in Project Life Cycle and Team Character Development

Project Management Journal June 1999 Successful project leaders are becoming aware of associated links between project life-cycle stage completions and the necessary group virtues that facilitate each project stage. The aggregate set of these virtues shapes the group character of the project team, i.e., their collective readiness to act ethically. At the same time that project leaders are shepherding a project through the life-cycle stages to completion, their professional responsibilities are implicitly expanding to include the identification and reinforcement of the associated sets of team virtues necessary for the success of each stage along the way. The lack of development of team virtues at one stage may well preclude the satisfactory advancement or completion of future project life-cycle stages because the team is not predisposed to complete the prior stage(s) with integrity (Kloppenborg & Petrick, in press; Petrick & Quinn, 1997). In this paper, we identify specific team virtues that are appropriate for the typical activities and closure documents of each project life-cycle stage. After clarifying the theoretical need for team character development, we identify team character development competencies needed by project leaders at each of the project life-cycle stages. We conclude by advocating the simultaneous development of both life-cycle technical competency and team character “behavioral” competency to improve successful project leadership.