Managing the "Becoming": An Institutional View of Resource Integration Misalignment in Projects

Abstract

Projects as the most tangible manifestation of temporary organizations are playing a significant role in mobilizing resources and navigating constant changes and disruptions in the business environment. Project actors with different institutional affiliations usually join together to accomplish tasks within a limited period of time. Due to the inherent tension between projects’ temporariness and the institutions’ stability, actors with their heterogeneous institutional prescriptions often encounter institutional misalignments, which may be the obstacles in ensuring on-time, on-quality, and on-budget project deliveries.

Given the theoretical sophistication and fragmentation in project literature, an integrated framework of project research is provided in this work. In response to the weakness in current theorizing about how institutional forces manifest themselves in projects and how project processes interact with the wider institutional context, this research proposes a new ontology of temporary organizations by drawing implications from institutional theory and service-dominant logic. The micro-level interactions in both intra- and inter-organizational projects are examined with the qualitative methodology. This research reveals the actuality of projects’ multilevel-embeddedness and provides a framework of 18 dimensions of institutional (mis)alignments. A toolkit solution comprising four categories of 27 resource integration enabling practices (RIEP) aggregated from 376 actions taken by practitioners is also presented for the reconciliation of the institutional misalignments in practice.