Organizational Factors Influencing Project Success

Training is a planned effort by an organization to facilitate learning in behaviors related to a job. Investment in training and development is important to the organization's and employees' long-term success. For human resource development, Nolan & Garavan noted that training programs can build relevant skills in areas such as strategic management, financial management, business development, and marketing.

Dezdar & Ainin suggested that training increases the level of knowledge, individual performance, and consequently organizational performance. Firms with a higher percentage of trained employees are likely to perceive training to be useful and the occurrence of human resources management practices that either encourages employees to undertake training.

Stock et al. noted that training and development are effective for enhancing cross-functional Research and Development (R&D) cooperation; even over-training can be positive and can improve employee learning. In the context of project management, it is important that managers receive training to develop interpersonal and technical skills, which usually increases the motivation of project teams. Dandage et al. verified that the lack of formal training to employees is one of the top priority barriers that affect effective implementation of risk management in projects. This leads to the last hypothesis:

Hypothesis 5: Training is positively related to project success.

Having developed five hypotheses, attention is turned to the research design and respective methods, described next.