Understanding your IT project organization´s character: exploring the differences between the cultures of an IT project and its base organization

Participants from 125 different Norwegian projects (including 41 IT projects) have described the organizational cultures of both their most recent project and the base organization they work for. Their descriptions are based on a typology that distinguishes between power, role, task and person cultures, as outlined in the classic work of R. Harrison (Harvard Business Review, pp. 119-128, 1972) and later developed further by C. Handy (1976). The results of this study indicate that projects are more task culture-oriented than their base organizations, with IT projects being only slightly closer to the task culture than other projects. Further, for a given project to move closer to the task culture at hand, a focus on increased elimination of hierarchical elements of the project is required.