Information Systems Projects and Individual Developer Outcomes: Role of Project Managers and Process Control

Abstract

We integrate control theory and the information systems (IS) project management literature using a multilevel lens to theorize the cross-level effects of technical IS project risk on individual developer outcomes—performance and psychological stress—and the mechanisms by which IS project managers’ project-related knowledge attenuates this relationship. We argue that IS project managers with project-related knowledge mitigate technical IS project risk by facilitating the enactment of internal and external process controls in their IS projects. Our empirical study involves data collected from 1,230 individual developers embedded in 130 IS project teams that are managed by 20 IS project managers. Our results provide strong support for the three-level model and its set of (a) cross-level main effects of technical IS project risk on individual developer outcomes, (b) cross-level main effects of IS project manager project-related knowledge on enacted internal and external process controls, and (c) cross-level moderation of the relationship between technical IS project risk and individual developer outcomes by IS project manager project-related knowledge through internal and external process controls. Our study provides insights on how IS project management, IS project process controls, and technical IS project risk must be managed as a system of multilevel dependencies to achieve the desired developer outcomes.

Keywords: control theory, project management, project risk, stress, performance, multilevel, HLM, three-level models