Organizational Factors Influencing Project Success

Research design

Given the theoretical review presented in this study, organizational factors were defined as independent variables and project success as dependent variable. A structured questionnaire was developed for data collection, considering the following organizational factors based on previous studies: (i) top management support; (ii) communication; (iii) change management; (iv) organizational culture; (v) training; and (vi) project success. The respondents indicated their agreement or disagreement with a statement on a seven-point Likert scale (from 1 = 'totally disagree' to 7 = 'totally agree').

To define company size, criteria from the Brazilian Micro and Small Business Support Service (SEBRAE) was used: micro-sized firms up to 19 employees, small-sized firms between 20 and 99 employees, medium-sized firms between 100 and 499 employees, and large-sized firms with 500 or more employees.

The questionnaire was firstly pilot-tested in two steps. First, two project managers and three academics verified the questionnaire. Second, a group of 10 professionals from the target automotive companies answered as well as assessed the questionnaire. After the feedback from the respondents, the questionnaire was adjusted in both form and contents for its final version.

The questionnaire we used in this study consists of five parts: (i) cover letter to introduce the respondent to the research topic, in which we emphasized the research's importance; (ii) respondent's characterization: contained information such as function and time of experience in projects; (iii) company's characterization: information regarding to the company, such as operation sector and kinds of projects; (iv) organizational factors; and (v) project success factor.

The survey instrument was hosted in a web-based environment. A link to access the questionnaire was sent to 385 participants of an 'automotive project management group' on LinkedIn (in Brazil). Seventy-two responses from different companies were received, yielding a response rate of approximately 19%; this can be considered suitable in operations management research.

In order to identify and evaluate the influence of organizational factors in the success of projects, we performed confirmatory factor analysis with the software R. For the reliability test, we used Cronbach's alpha and composite reliability tests. Finally, to verify the validity of constructs, we used the average variance extracted. Answers from respondents were analyzed according to the Box & Cox transformation and we used the Shapiro- Wilk test for normality.