Reflecting activities in product developing teams: conditions for improved project management processes

摘要

The study presented in this paper was designed to investigate the relationship between psycho-social aspects of project work and team-based activities that enable reflection upon project teams' own practices. The study includes 144 project-active product developers in 20 Swedish manufacturing companies. Data were collected by means of a questionnaire survey. The main question addressed was how individual project members' psychosocial work environment is related to participation and involvement in team-based reflecting activities. A further question was whether reflectivity in local project teams is related to improvement to overarching processes. The results show that three of the tested factors promote reflectivity in project teams, such as a high level of project work experience, a high level of time pressure, and extensive managerial support. It is also shown that reflecting activity at local project team level is associated with improvement to project management processes at a more general level.