The Effect of Leadership in Project Management

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Introduction

All organisations design and implement projects of varying magnitudes. The need to execute projects within fixed timelines with limited resources has seen many organisations demand people who are experienced in the field of project management to take over the leadership of projects within the organisations.

This has made project management evolve over the last five decades as an independent body of knowledge as opposed to being an additional skill required for organisational professionals.

The growing emphasis of the importance of cute management of people in the effort to yield organisational success has also made organisations resort to developing their management approaches from the contexts of organisational leadership as opposed to organisational administration.

The role of leadership in enhancing organisational performance is highly studied in organisations, thus leading to the emergence of a large scholarly body of knowledge that discusses the effectiveness of various leadership styles. The aim of this paper is to draw knowledge from both disciplines of project management and leadership separately and then merge them to prescribe the roles of leadership within the field of project management.

Leaders who operate as project managers deploy leadership characteristics, which are similar to leaders within functional and operational organisations. However, projects are constrained in terms of time and resources. This means that leaders in project-based organisations condense their leadership roles to assume temporary functions in the effort to guarantee the achievement of results for a project team.

Some project management scholars emphasise that projects needs to be managed by managers rather than leaders. However, this paper argues that enhancing the success of projects using people working in a teamwork environment requires the people in charge of projects leadership to have various skills that enhance motivation, commitment to various project tasks, and/or foster knowledge sharing between work groups.

Leadership is important in project management. In the effort to justify this hypothetical proposition, the paper attempts to provide a clear understanding of the concept of leadership in project management by proposing the most important leadership skills that project managers should have.

It also demonstrates how to use leadership skills to deal with problems in a real project management practice. Finally, it offers suggestions on how to gain leadership skills.

Leadership in Project Management

Leadership is important in all areas involving the use of people to achieve certain results by following particular processes. According to Kedharnath (2011), leadership is important in every aspect of life including politics, business environments, religion, and social networks among other scenarios (p.8).

A leader is a person who plans, controls, direct, and/or guides other people towards attaining a common mutual objective and goals. Leadership occurs through interaction of three main contexts. These are leaders, followers, and situations, which prompt the deployment of leadership skills (Atchison 2003, p.45; Higgs 2003 p.273).

In the context of project management, the project itself provides the situation, which brings together leaders and followers for the achievement of a common mutual goal, which is the completion of the project within the stipulated timeframes and within the provided limited monetary resources.

The goal of the leader in such a setting is to facilitate the realisation of the project’s concerns by enhancing integration of various project facets to ensure that tasks do not derail from the preset project execution plan.

Scholarly findings on how various components of projects need to be controlled and planned provide evidence of the role of leadership in project management as the arm that plans and controls the project. For instance, clear plans and means of controlling projects are required during scope management (Kjorstad 2010, p.19).

Scope management encompasses all processes and procedures that are required in ensuring that a project takes into incorporation the required set of tasks to complete it successfully and within the stipulated time constraints. It constitutes scope initiation, scope planning, scope definition, scope verification, and change control of the scope (Tolbert 2008).

Hence, scope planning helps in guiding the process of allocating time and monetary values to the project. Scope definition refers to the subdivision of all major deliverables of the project into small manageable deliverables. All these aspects require the contribution of leadership. Leaders analyse the skill bases of the work team members.

They also design and allocate various job fragments based on the skills identified to ensure that people are engaged in the tasks with which they are acquitted (Mumford, Campion & Morgeson 2007 p.157).

This helps in the minimisation of time wastage in learning new skills and procedures of work. Consequently, attaining the concerns of a project as enumerated in the project scope definition calls for consideration of people’s skills and abilities. Leaders have the capacity to provide this information.

The link between leadership and project management is evident by consideration of the manner in which projects are executed in contemplation of various leadership schools of thought. Leadership is one of the most studied disciplines within an organisation (Pearce & Conger 2003, p.8).

Daft (2005) supports the importance of leadership in an organisation by claiming, “There have been several attempts to provide a description and analysis of the essential facets defining effective leadership” (p.56). Although themes of leadership are ingrained in the works of Plato and Confucius, scholarship in the discipline of leadership in the 20th century began with the introduction of the trait theory school of thought.

Mumford, Campion, and Morgeson note that theoretical constructs in leadership studies initiated by researching certain inheritable attributes so that it becomes possible to differentiate people who can lead and those who cannot lead (2007, p.159). This marked the initiation of the trait theory in leadership approaches deployed by organisations.

Trait leadership claims that certain personality that defines different people is indicative of one’s leadership abilities. This implies that not all people can effectively lead projects to attain their goals, objectives, and aims in the discipline of project management.

In the process of evolution of the trait leadership theory, various skills and personality characteristics together with certain demographic characteristics that may describe and/or predict one’s capability to lead have been defined and developed (Mumford, Campion and Morgeson 2007, p.157). Such characteristics include extraversion and self-confidence.

Trait theory raises the question of the possibility of determination of particular leadership traits, which can help to resolve common challenges, which are encountered in the field of project management.

According to Benator and Thumann, project management encounters the challenges of inadequate resources, poor teamwork commitment, insufficient planning, breakdown in communication, and the need to respond to the changing goals and resources in the process of project execution (2006, p.13).

The cognition of these problems has made project managers resort to seeking various mechanisms of providing a response to these challenges besides seeking mechanisms of obtaining skills and knowledge that are required to address them.

Struggles with this scholarly question lead to the establishment of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), which identifies nine major knowledge areas of concern in project management (Duncan 1996, p.23; Haughey 2012, p.5).

They are “procurement management, scope management, cost management, risk management, integration management, time management, and communication management” (IEEE 2008, p.11).

Applying traits leadership theory or any other theory of leadership in project management requires the definition of the appropriate traits that can enhance leaders’ capacity to address these nine knowledge areas proactively and effectively.

The traits leadership theory may be deployed in project management to identify a set of characteristics, which may enhance the performance of project management roles. Ng, Ang, and Chan (2008) identify these traits as “problems solving skills, self-confidence, energy and initiative, perspective, communication, results orientations and negotiating abilities” (p.735).

These are intrinsic personality traits, which respond to the main challenges encountered in the project management.

Possession of the traits identified by Ng, Ang and Chan (2008) are also consistent with the main concerns of project management enumerated by the PMBOK. However, there emerge problems in the application of the leadership trait theory to describe the contribution of leadership in projects management. The theory suggests that leaders are born and not made in any way.

Opposed to the above assertion, studies done by Kouzes (2007), Tayler (2006), and Lewis (2007) provide evidence that better capacity to lead a project can be enhanced by experience and sharing of knowledge developed through involvement in active roles in managing different projects in the past. This opposes the arguments developed by trait leadership theory that leaders are born, but not created.

According to Ng, Ang, and Chan (2008), trait leadership theory suffers from reliability and validity challenges since not all people possessing qualities of effective leadership identified by the theory make great leaders. This criticism poses an interrogative on the evidence of the capacity of the trait leadership theory to provide a reliable explanation of leadership roles in project management.

In fact, according to Ng, Ang, and Chan (2008), many people who possess personality traits described by trait leadership theories as constituting essential requirements for effective leaders do not necessarily depict the essential traits of great leaders.

The challenges of the use of the trait leadership school of thought to explain organisational leadership led to the emergence of other leadership schools of thought such as situational and contingency leadership theories. Contingency leadership theories focus on particular factors defining an environment, which help in the determination of an effective leadership style.

According to Peretomode (2012), examples of contingency theories of leadership include the theory of effective leadership advanced by Fielder, strategic contingency theory, and cognitive resource theory (p.106).

For example, with regard to Fielder’s contingency theory, leadership style, which yields outstanding results in one environment, does not necessarily work in another. The theory considers various facets, which determine the capacity of a leader to take control of a given situation. Such facets encompass task control, the ability to enhance teamwork relations, and the capacity to possess positioning powers.

Furthermore, according to the contingency theory, leaders can be classified based on whether they are task or relationship-oriented. Task-oriented leaders perform better in work environments that are characterised by well-structured surroundings and good relationships between members and leaders.

The leader also works and realises results in settings where he or she has a strong or even weak power of positioning decisions (Peretomode 2012, p.51). A project has the problem of poor motivation of team members (Tayler 2006, p.14).

Contingency leadership theory can help in influencing motivational skills of a leader by providing explanations on how leaders can analyse various situations, which result in low motivation and commitment. This can help a project manager to turn around the problems that constantly recur in the field of project management.

Opposed to the contingency leadership theory, situational leadership theories argue that leaders determine the most appropriate mechanisms of conducting leadership roles subject to the variables comprising the current situation within an organisation.

This means that situational leaders in project management can help in the resolution of the challenges of occurrence of any incidences of changing goals and processes in the due process of project execution.

The contribution of situational leadership theory in explaining the roles of leadership in project management is also evident by appreciating that particular scenarios requiring making of decisions call for different forms of leadership styles (Dye 2010, p.109).

For instance, when leaders possess a high experience and knowledge on the most effective ways of driving organisational success, authoritarian leadership style is the most preferred (Higgs 2003, p.275). Conversely, where employees or subjects possess high skill levels on their areas of specialisations, deployment of the democratic form of leadership is the most appropriate in the effort to drive the success of projects.

Another theoretical paradigm for explaining leadership is the charismatic school of thought. According to Lussier and Achua, this school of thought “inherited situational leadership theory and distilled it into either transactional or transformational leadership styles” (2004, p.91). The distinction between transformational and transactional leadership is based on the central concerns of each styles.

These concerns are on operational leadership, the processes of situational leadership changes, and the relationship existing among leadership styles (Schaubroeck, Lam & Cha 2007, p.1022). Projects mainly focus on bringing about changes. Hence, the focus of the charismatic school of thought in relation to project management dwells on transformational leadership.

Goleman (1995) introduced the concept of emotional intelligence as developed by Goleman (1998). Schaubroeck, Lam, and Cha (2007) discuss the concept of emotional intelligence as a success factor for effective leadership in an organisation. These schools of thought describe four main theoretical constructs that constitute an emotional intelligent leader.

These are “self awareness, self management, social awareness and relationship management” (Schaubroeck, Lam & Cha 2007, p.1025). Researchers such as Kerr et al. (2006), Leban and Zulauf (2004), and Lowe and Kroeck (1996) found a positive correlation between these four traits and leaders’ emotional intelligence and with the success of organisation that the studied leaders were in charge of leading.

The emotional intelligence school of thought suggests that various leaders who want to resolve various problems emerging in an organisation can learn, observe, and/or develop emotional intelligence skills (Cote et al. 2010, p.497; Dulewicz 2003, p.194).

The competency school of thought developed through the competency model of leadership binds various theories of leadership. This way, the competency model provides a detailed and holistic approach of studying organisational leadership.

Hoffman et al. (B 2011) state, “The competency school reflects the traits, behaviours, visionary, situational, and emotional intelligence facets of the other schools to present a robust description of a leader” (p.354). Projects are complex in nature. For instance, various components of project management approaches entail managing different project elements.

For example, project procurement constitutes an integral part of the process of project management in which various services or products are bought through a myriad of external sources outside the employees’ base. These products and services are used to complete the stipulated tasks making up the project (Duncan 1996).

Under the stipulations of PMBOK, project planning management also entails “a variety of tasks including the planning process where it is decided on what to acquire and how it will be done” (Duncan1996). In this complex process, different leadership skills and styles are required.

Leadership Skills Possessed by Project Managers

General managerial literature and leadership practices provide an important starting point of evaluating important leadership skills that are required by project managers. Positive relationship between leadership and organisational success is well documented. While developing this relationship, Turner and Muller (2006) provide details of effects of project management in enhancing the success of projects (pp.23-39).

Based on the literature review conducted by Turner and Muller (2005), leadership qualities possessed by project managers have a direct implication on the success of a project in achieving its goals and objectives (p. 221). Direct implications include enhancement of motivation and development of positive perceptions of the success of the project (Smith 2009, p.75).

Indirect impacts of leadership skills possessed by project managers include leading of project work teams with the chief focus being on gaining success. In particular, Turner and Muller (2005) point out, “the project managers’ personal characteristics including leadership style and emotional intelligence make a contribution to project success” (p.49).

Positive correlation between project leadership and the success of projects receives additional support from many other researchers. For instance, Pinto and Trailer (2005) reckon, “projects often fall short of achieving their anticipated results, not due to the lack of project management, but rather from the lack of project leadership” (p.15).

However, despite this support of the contribution of leadership in enhancing projects’ success, Turner and Muller (2006), and Pinto and Trailer (2005) do not identify various leadership skills that are the most important to form project management knowledge repositories.

Different projects have different needs. Leadership skills that are considered the most important for project managers vary from industry to industry. Mike (2005) identifies transactional and transformational leadership behaviours as the most important behaviours for project managers in the IT industry projects (p.37). Bass (1995) insists that one leader can display such qualities simultaneously.

For effective project management, project leaders have to deploy appropriate mix of the two leadership skills to meet the projects’ needs depending on various situations.

Conger (1999) confirms the importance of transactional and transformational leadership skills for project managers claiming, “Transformational leadership augments followers’ effort and performance over and beyond the performance produced by transactional leadership alone” (p.167). Thite (2000) also found such augmentation as crucial and significant for the success of projects (p.237).

One of the major challenges of project management is how to enhance performance through fostering commitment of the work team members to the project’s goals and objectives coupled with enhancing their motivation. Possession of transactional leadership skills helps to resolve these challenges.

“Transactional project leaders motivate followers by engaging in transactional or exchange relationships in which they exchange rewards for performance” (Mike 2005, p.38).

Transactional leaders deploy motivation approaches to increase task accomplishment anticipations by emphasising that specific performance in project tasks allocated to them would lead to the attainment of a specific level of output, which forms the basis of rewards.

Transactional project management leaders are smart enough to deploy project leadership behaviours such as management by exemption and/or contingent rewards (Mike 2005, p.38). The contingent rewards encompass the attempts to motivate organisational followers through clear and well-defined tasks, which are then rewarded accordingly upon their successful completion to meet quality standards.

This implies that projects’ work team members work hard while paying attention to projects’ quality standards in the quest to gain the monetary rewards. This ensures that projects are completed within the slotted period.

Transformational leadership skills enable project managers to frame various issues associated with project tasks in a manner that stimulates followers in the effort to motivate them. This helps the followers to articulate the work of the project with their personal values.

To achieve this goal, project managers exhibit behaviours such as “idealised influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualised considerations” (Bass et al. 1993, p.39).

Idealised influence capacitates project leaders to act as role models for portrayal of capabilities that are exceptional with reference to enhancing convictions of followers to a particular vision together with the behaviours that the project leaders want the followers to portray.

Inspiration is essential in enabling followers to develop compelling visions together with helping them to handle the challenges encountered in the work place through the provision of a clear meaning and the desired goals of the specific tasks allocated to them.

This strategy is critical in enabling work members to identify themselves with their groups’ collective commitments to the achievement of tasks expectations by gaining self-confidence. This move is incredibly important in helping project leaders to stimulate “followers to be innovative and creative by encouraging them to approach familiar situations in new ways” (Mike 2005, p.39).

Such an effort is important in leading a project from the paradigm of building knowledge-based projects. The capacity to foster knowledge sharing is yet another important skill of effective project leaders.

Petty groups the leadership skill for top performers leaders in project management into “strategic awareness, executive presence, leadership maturity, and executive orientation” (2009, p.9). Leadership maturity refers to the understanding of project managers on their roles as leaders coupled with the behaviours that they are supposed to display to influence other people performing various tasks constituting the project.

Leadership maturity is an essential set of skills possessed by project managers. Project managers need to have the ability to lead by formal directions or authority. They should have the capacity to communicate effectively with various stakeholders to enhance team development (Palmer et al. 2001, p.7).

Petty (2009) argues that some organisations fail to educate their project managers to become strategic decision makers (p.11). Within some organisations, projects are internal components. Hence, strategic awareness is an important skill that enables project managers to link the project under their control and monitoring to the general needs of customers.

Leadership entails working in a teamwork environment to influence other people in the effort to have things done in the right way. Petty (2009) insists that project managers need to have the “ability to work outside the project team with broader organisations and functional leaders to get things done” (p.10).

This ability defines the skills of execution orientation. As sources of effective knowledge repository, leaders should encourage the sharing of this knowledge between various work groups to ensure coherence of various tasks comprising the entire project once they are finally linked up together.

The capacity to lead a project as a knowledge-based temporary organisation has attracted the attention of many scholars in the field of project management. For instance, in the 21^st century, which is a century characterised by sophisticated information tools, a major argument is that organisations that would succeed in realising constant productivity are the ones, which have innovative leadership abilities.

Consistent with this proposition, Zahidul et al. (2011) argues, “Sharing of knowledge between employees and departments in the organisation is necessary to transfer individual and group knowledge into organisational knowledge, which leads to effective management of knowledge” (p.1900).

However, in project-based organisations, a challenge is established in the attempt to manage and integrate individual knowledge facets into one body of knowledge leading to optimal utilisation of the available limited resources to achieve project requirements.

In this context, Alekseev (2010) argues, “the problem, which might be not so important for a singular project becomes a significant issue for organisations that use projects on a regular basis for delivering their strategic objectives” (p.4). This problem is articulated to memory losses in a project.

Leading information systems in a project implies that the knowledge developed during the project execution process cease from being relevant in a new project development when the project is completed.

Such developments would entail coming up with completely new knowledge bases coupled with methodologies to enhance the success of the project at hand so that it meets the technological requirements at the particular time of the project implementation.

Consequently, the existing information on the experiences of an organisation in implementation of previous projects would appear largely not influential in evaluating the new projects. The main concern here is that individual projects would increase the probability of replication of similar mistakes.

Zahidul et al. (2011) support this criticism by further adding, “When individuals share organisationally relevant experiences and information with one another, it significantly increases the resources of an organisation and decreases the time wasted in trial-and error” (p.1900).

Although sharing of knowledge as an essential skill for project managers plays the role of making project implementers competitive and innovative, projects have peculiar challenges, which often create friction to the realisation of the advantages of development of a knowledge base.

One of such challenges arises from the characteristics of a project particularly its trait of being a time-bound endeavour. In any project, various specialists join hands to perform various innovative and complicated tasks within some stipulated amount of time. When they are through with the tasks, disbandment of the work teams takes place.

If such a similar project be demanded in the future, chances are that the previous members of work teams would not come together to execute the future project. Even though this may help in limiting the impacts of the previous experiences on influencing or limiting the levels of innovation in the future projects, chances also exist that similar mistakes made in the previous project would be repeated.

Additionally, since there is the tendency of creating a likelihood for project teams to be made of different persons every time a need to execute a similar project comes up, “managing knowledge in the context of project work encounters specific cultural and organising challenges such as forming work groups” (Alekseev 2010, p.5). This means that sharing and dissemination of knowledge also becomes challenged.

However, the fact that projects exhibit opportunities for different people to interact in the execution of time-bound tasks, opportunities also exist for fostering multiculturalism within an organisation. The capacity to deal with people from different cultures and other diversities is an important skill for project management leaders.

Another essential leadership skill for project managers is the call for putting in place leadership styles that focus on the manner in which people can improve their performance in projects. Followers want leaders who can help them grow professionally to become independent actors within an organisation (Atchison, 2003).

This move is a major milestone in the adoption of participatory leadership, which is crucial for motivation of employees. In this regard, Pearce and Conger (2003) argue that an effective leader designs his or her leadership styles around the perspectives of followership theories.

He or she needs to discuss with followers about “the importance of quality work, the need for renewed commitment to high standards, and a reiteration of personal and group accountability” (p.123).

In this context, it sounds imperative to infer that followers welcome openness to any new idea that may enhance their performance together with confidence in the manner in which a work group can create positive changes that would benefit them. This aspect is vital in the development of effective leadership skills in project leadership.

Using Leadership Skills to deal with Problems in Real Project Management Practices

Any project is often constrained by time, resources, and the need to lead processes to meet the desires goals and objectives. Another major challenge in the project execution processes is the challenge of orienting people to the desired outcomes.

Projects involve bringing about change. In their natural state, people are normally reluctant to embrace change. Various leadership skills are required to deal with these problems and many others that are encountered in the daily routines of a project manager.

To deal with the problems encountered in projects, Petty (2009) emphasises that project managers should utilise their strategic awareness skills. These skills are applied in practice by developing awareness with the project strategic environment. Focusing on strategic awareness to resolve the challenges encountered during project execution process implies that projects are subject to market dynamics.

Such dynamics include time compressions, complexities in project execution strategies, and the rising need for employing people having high knowledge levels to help in meeting the increasing calls for projects to deliver high quality outcomes. This means that successful project managers are those who execute their roles through strategic priorities.

People execute tasks that form a project when clarity is provided on the mission and objective of the tasks allocated to them in the context of the realisation of the objectives of the entire project. Strategic awareness offers a complete tool kit that may lack in a project (Petty 2009, p.14).

For instance, a project manager may recognise poor motivation as the main contributor to the failure of the work group members to meet deadlines for completion of their work. Through strategic awareness skills, the project managers or the leader would focus on the strategy of seeking ways of enhancing motivation through the deployment of other skills such as transactional and transformational leadership skills (Mike 2005).

Resolving a problem that may derail the capacity to complete a project within the required times lines requires a project leader to deploy skills that aid in the creation of high performance work teams.

This calls for the evaluation of situations in the project to determine the requisite leadership skills to recall from the set of leadership skills possessed by a project manager. Hence, situational and contingency leadership skills are crucial in resolution of the problems experienced in projects.

Evidence on the applicability of situational leadership skills in the resolution of the problems encountered in projects rests on the platforms of the changing leadership styles to suit the changing projects’ needs.

Addressing the issue of situational dynamics, Pearce and Conger argue that there exists no single style of leadership, which would fit all situations since leadership is essentially grounded on the relevance of tasks requiring leadership (2003, p.105).

Hence, successful project leaders are those who adapt their leadership styles and grow them to maturity depending on the situation under which they execute their project management functions.

Apart from the consideration of the tasks in the formulation of the necessary leadership style, situational leadership skills help project managers to consider the characteristics of people being led in the determination of an appropriate leadership style in an attempt to build high performance work teams.

Leadership skills can help project manager to handle the challenge of creating high performance work teams in various ways. For instance, emotional intelligence skills enable them to create contexts that are fertile for the development of the work group members.

In support of this assertion, Petty (2009) maintains, “high performance project managers work to ensure that their team members can connect the project and their contributions and organisational goals” (p.30). Success of such an effort requires the deployment of motivational leadership skills. Projects’ stakeholders work homogenously when they have a collective understanding of the relevance of the project.

The applicability of leadership skills in helping to resolve the challenges encountered in projects akin to motivational problems are endorsed by the theories of workforce motivation, which maintain that people are productive in an organisation when they consider themselves useful, meaningful, and important to an organisation.

Suggestions on how to gain Leadership Skills

Upon consideration of the leadership needs that are critical in fostering successful completion of projects within the usual constraints of time and financial resource challenges, the traits leadership theory’s claims that leaders are not created, but are born. In fact, scholarly studies in leadership studies contend that certain skills, which make project managers successful in their work, can be learned.

For instance, according to Pinto and Trailer (2005), winning the confidence of the people implementing a project can be achieved by an effort to cultivate credibility (p.23). Petty (2009) stated that project managers with exemplary leadership skills recognise that people follow directions if such directions emanate from the people they perceive to be credible and reliable.

This means that leadership skills can be developed if project managers have the zeal and internal drive to develop leadership credibility through strategies such as treating people with optimal fairness, ensuring that they communicate openly, and focusing on resolving problems affecting people.

Developing the skills of emotional intelligence requires leaders to curtail from engaging in any situations, which may truncate into questioning the integrity and the motivations of a given leader by followers.

Interpersonal and intrapersonal communication skills are key success skills for project managers. After identification of various situations, which may impair the capacity of the work members to toil effectively, communication of the mechanisms of countering such situations is vital.

Upon identification of requisite motivational strategies, communication is also important in aligning employees to the strategies. This claim suggests that communication is an important skill that binds various leadership skills that enhance performance of employees in projects.

The leadership skills of effective communication may be developed in a myriad of ways. Petty (2009) argues that communication skills can be developed by allowing people to know and understand that the project managers’ role is to enable them succeed (p.23). He further considers this role best realised when communication is done through actions and in words.

In search of directions to meet the goals of the project, people would resort to meeting the leader for clarifications, guidance, and help. In this process, it becomes possible to articulate various issues that project managers consider necessary for alteration to facilitate the achievement of project’s goals and objectives.

Application of different leadership skills, which suit different situations, requires leaders to analyse situations to determine when to communicate with assertiveness and/or when to avoid over communication.

When rapid changes are required in the project execution process, over communication is dangerous (Mike 2005, p.21). This means that determination of the appropriate leadership skills to apply in a given situation is determined by the projects’ strategy.

Expertise is developed through learning and practice to gain experience. To gain leadership skills, coaching is necessary. Consequently, it is important for project managers seeking to gain leadership skills that are effective in project management to get aid and mentorship from persons having the skills that one wants to develop.

The decision on the requisite skills to develop has to be based on the observation and analysis of the project environment needs such as the problems that derail the project from accomplishing its objectives.

For instance, project tasks may be falling out of time due to lack of commitment of people in charge of implementing them. Consequently, the project manager needs to develop leadership skills for workforce motivation. Such skills can be developed through the study of the existing benchmarks.

Conclusion

Projects are executed with the help of people who are mandated to carry out various tasks that constitute a project. While management skills are required by the project managers to ensure compliance with the set project execution procedures within fixed timelines and under limited resources, the involvement of people in the implementation of projects requires project managers to have good leadership skills.

The evaluation of the necessary leadership skills in project management was considered in the paper from the theoretical paradigms of the trait leadership theories, contingency, situational, competency, and emotional intelligence theories. Each of these theories has its contribution in the generation of effective leadership skills for successful execution of projects.

Thus, an integrated approach to the study of leadership skills that are necessary for development by project managers is important. Project managers need to be influencers, transformational, and transactional leaders who possess a high degree of emotional intelligence to aid them in determining various situations that require different leadership skills.

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