Product Development Tensions: Exploring Contrasting Styles of Project Management

Successful product development requires managing tensions-coping with fluctuating contingencies to foster innovation and efficiency. To investigate this challenge, we explored the nature, dynamics, and impacts of contrasting project management styles. Our conceptual framework details emergent and planned styles. Following 80 projects over two-year periods, we find that these styles offer disparate but interwoven approaches to monitoring, evaluation, and control activities; use of these activities fluctuates over time; a paradoxical blend of styles enhances performance; and uncertainty moderates project management-performance relationships.