Forecasting project performance considering the influence of leadership style on organizational agility

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the influence of leadership style and factors associated with organization agility on project performance. Design/methodology/approach – It is a case study carried out at a leading corporation driven towards innovation projects. Literature on this subject seems to be mainly focused on the contribution of processes and strategies that lead to agility, and few cases report the influence of people and leadership style on this factor. Upon analysis, a proposed characterization of the relationship between leadership, agility and project performance is presented. A Bayesian Network (BN) model is employed as a modeling tool, enabling both inferences and sensitivity analysis and also visualization and quantification of the propagation of effects between variables. Findings – The main result of this study is the characterization of under which combination of leadership style, agility and organizational factors the highest project performance can be achieved. Originality/value – The paper helps clear up the mistaken view that high agility only takes place when all constituent factors display maximum values. The leadership style and people contribution to agility is clearly addressed. This kind of approach is original and helps to answer the question found in the literature of how much agility is needed, through the identification of the individual contributions of each of the system variables. The view offered by the model discussed in this paper enables understanding and visualizing how this takes place, thus allowing for gearing more focused and effective actions towards the key variables.