Attitudes and leadership competences for project success

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relative importance of project managers' attitudes towards their project and their leadership competences for achieving project success. Leadership competences were assessed as emotional, managerial, and intellectual competences (EQ, MQ, IQ, respectively) using the leadership dimensions questionnaire. Attitudes were assessed through the importance project managers assign to the project success criteria. Design/methodology/approach – Building on the competency school of leadership theories, this study used 400 responses to a global web‐based questionnaire to identify the variances in attitudes and leadership competences of project managers and its relation to project success. ANOVA and regression analyses were used to identify how attitudes and leadership competences related to project results. Findings – The paper identifies two types of results variances, these are, variances in project results and variances in business results. The former is caused by the attitudes of project managers, the latter is caused by a mixture of their attitude and emotional competences. Research limitations/implications – The results show the relative importance of specific attitudes and leadership competences for different types of project success. Practical implications – The results indicate key areas for project manager development in order to move from mediocre to superior project results. Originality/value – The paper builds on prior work in EQ, MQ, and IQ for project management and is the first study to identify a migration theory for the combination of attitudes and leadership competences for project success.