Chapter List

16.1 INTRODUCTION

Leadership has been studied and written about extensively in the twentieth century. There have been thousands of articles and papers authored about the subject. Several hundred books have also appeared that examine the function of leadership in many different forms of organizations governmental, industrial, and political to mention a few. One of the more recent examinations of the leadership function in modern organizations is a comparison of leaders and managers. One notable researcher, Warren Bennis, described a leader as someone who does the right thing, and the manager as someone who does things right. This is an interesting viewpoint that is explored more fully in this chapter.

This chapter tries to put leadership into a project perspective. Leadership is defined; some of the principal studies of leadership are presented. The nature of a leadership style that is appropriate for leading a project team is described. Leadership is offered from the perspective of the management of attention, management of meaning, management of trust, and management of self, and should arouse the personal interest of the student and reader. Project leadership is differentiated from other forms of leadership and the competencies that project leaders should have are described. A clear differentiation between project leaders and project managers cannot be made because that differentiation involves an understanding of a complex set of...