Impact of Team Attitude and Behavior on IS Project Success

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Information technology (IT) is an ever-increasing resource with which an organization can create and sustain its competitive advantages (Powell & Micallef, 1997; Igbaria et al., 1998; Shuit, 2004). Organizations attempt to use IS projects as enablers to perform business activities for providing better products or services. However, an IS project is a two-edged sword. A triumph example is evidenced by General Motors shortening the design-to-production time by 30 months since 1996 via an IS project for digitalization of the engineering process (Nash, 2003). A well documented breakdown failure of an IS project is the computerized baggage handling system at the Denver International Airport, which delayed the opening of the airport by 16 months and went over budget by about $2 billion (Montealegre & Keil, 2000). A number of studies have been conducted to improve IS project performance from the project team's perspective (Henderson & Lee, 1992; Robey et al., 1993; Aladwani, 2002). Such studies demonstrated that managing an IS project team systematically and scientifically can contribute to successful completion of the project. According to the CHAOS reports (The Standish Group, 1994; 2004), the IS project success rate increased from 16% in 1994 to 34% in 2004. Although such existing theories as project management, systems development life cycle management, and project risk management might have contributed to significant improvements in the overall IS project success rate, about two-thirds of all IS projects still belong to failed or challenged categories in 2004 and it seems too difficult to increase the overall IS project success rate further. Consequently, researchers need to carry out more empirical studies about how to achieve IS project success. Given the importance of IS projects and the unsatisfactory IS project success rate, this study attempts to examine factors of achieving IS project success from the team attitude and behavior perspective by incorporating teamwork quality a well-known construct but not being related to IS project success directly and empirically. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the literature review as a theoretical foundation and presents the research model. The research methodology is discussed in Section 3. Section 4 then presents data analysis and discusses results. The last section concludes the contributions of this study as well as addresses limitations and future research directions. THEORETICAL DEVELOPMENT AND RESEARCH MODEL An IS project is unambiguously regarded as an enabler of change for today's organizations. In general, an IS project is intended to develop information systems used to deploy business processes and services successfully. Among IS project success studies, Henderson and Lee (1992) argued that managerial and team member controls can affect IS project performance. A conflict model proposed by Robey et al. (1993) stated that project team members' participation, influence, conflict, and conflict resolution have direct or indirect effects on IS project success. Prior work has also demonstrated that the impact of interpersonal conflict and conflict management (Barki & Hartwick, 2001) and both internal and external team conflicts (Wang et al., 2005) on IS project performance. Aladwani (2002) studied IS project performance by integrating theories of IS, organizational teams, and project management and found that support technologies, management advocacy, and clear goals have direct effects on IS project performance but project-team size and staff expertise have indirect effects on it via problem solving competency. Other researchers, such as Barki and Hartwick (1994), Marble (2003), and Wang et al. (2006), have shed some lights on the impact of management commitment and control on IS project performance. Chan et al. (2008) found that project team task skills can facilitate application and development skills, resulting in IS project success. …