Title: Moderating role of team sensemaking between the relationship of change-oriented leadership behaviours and project team performance

Authors: Maleehah Gull; Khalil Md Nor; Iqra Abdullah

Addresses: Azman Hashim International Business School, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, T08, 81310, Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia ' Azman Hashim International Business School, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, T08, 81310, Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia ' Business Studies Department, Namal University, Mianwali, Pakistan

Abstract: Leadership has been held highly responsible for managing the change and influencing the project team performance. Hence, the previous studies investigating the project team performance and leadership behaviours in IT projects have been thoroughly reviewed by the researchers. Particularly, research related to IT projects has presented mixed findings on the relationship between change-oriented behaviours and performance-related variables. Therefore, this study is aimed to investigate the effects of change-oriented leadership behaviour on team performance in software houses of Pakistan. Furthermore, the moderating effect of team sensemaking on the relationship of change-oriented leadership behaviours and project team performance is also studied. The primary data for the current study was collected from 331 project team members of the software houses in Pakistan. Results based on the structural equation modelling (SEM) method showed that team sensemaking significantly moderates the relationship between change-oriented leadership behaviours and project team performance. These findings offer numerous academic and practical implications that are explained in the article.

Keywords: change-oriented leadership behaviours; COLB; team sensemaking; project team performance; PTP; software house; IT industry; Pakistan.

DOI: 10.1504/MEJM.2023.133771

Middle East Journal of Management, 2023 Vol.10 No.6, pp.687 - 703

Received: 27 Apr 2022
Accepted: 11 Jul 2022
Published online: 03 Oct 2023 *

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