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1. Introduction
In the context of the contemporary economic environment’s growing uncertainty, the agile project management approach has been recognized as highly promising. While some project-based organizations migrate to agile methods, others commit to traditional project management approaches (referred to as “waterfall” models).
Academic research has developed the consensus that the choice of project management approaches should depend on other organizational factors, such as firm size, type and peculiarities of projects, available human capital, leadership style and organizational culture. Among these factors determining the effectiveness of project management, one of the most important relates to organizational human resource management (HRM) activities. Studies report that failures in the implementation of agile methods have typically been caused by HRM-related problems, such as the lack of employees’ soft skills, deterred communications, discrepancy between responsibilities and actual competencies of team members and inefficient leadership styles (Cockburn and Highsmith, 2001; McAvoy and Butler, 2009; Koch and Turk, 2013; Hoda and Murugesan, 2016; Dhir et al., 2019). So far, findings on HRM-related issues of agile implementation are highly fragmented and, therefore, are often poorly understood.
Although HRM is considered a crucial factor of project management success (Zwikael and Unger-Aviram, 2010; Popaitoon and Siengthai, 2014; Khan and Rasheed, 2015), the gap between project management and HRM still exists both in practice and in academic research (Bredin and Söderlund, 2011; Bellini and Canonico, 2008). Little is known about what HRM practices and systems high-performing project-based organizations use and how they typically differ in agile and traditional firms. Furthermore, organizations still lack guidance on how they should configure their HRM systems, human capital and other human resource (HR)-related attributes.
In this research, we argue that the approach to project management is significantly determined by organizational HRM factors. In our study, we go beyond the analysis of how HRM practices used by project-based firms relate to firm performance and consider the broader concept of HRM architecture, comprising the system of HRM practices, important features of human capital and organizational structures for managing people. The purpose of our research is to explore HRM architectures in high-performing project-based organizations and understand how they may differ between agile and traditional firms. We use a configurational lens and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to reveal configurations of HRM...