The Impact of Leadership Roles on Team Satisfaction, Team Effectiveness and Project Performance – A Study of Project Managers in Malaysia

Many organizations today are deploying project teams to deliver various services or resolve different problems as they recognize the team performance is always exceeding the individual outputs combined. According to Project Management Institute (PMI), project manager’s leadership skills are deemed important as they help achieving the project goals set by stakeholders. However, there is lack of study whether a project manager’s leadership roles can improve team satisfaction, team effectiveness and project performance concurrently (Cohen & Bailey, 1997) or following a certain pattern of dependencies. This study developed a research model based on research works conducted by Cohen and Bailey (1997) and Yukl (2010) to empirically analyze how leadership roles are influencing team satisfaction, team effectiveness and project performance. Result showed that when a project manager is demonstrating his or her leadership roles more frequently, the project team becomes more effective. When the team effectiveness increases, this will lead to higher team satisfaction and improve project performance. Moreover, when the project team becomes more satisfied, it will also directly increase the project performance. However, execution of the leadership roles by project manager will not directly influence the team satisfaction and project performance. Discussion, conclusion, limitation and future research are also included in this article