Project and Organizational Antecedents of Effort Withholding in IT Project Teams

When individuals assigned to Information Technology (IT) projects do not work as hard as they could, effort withholding occurs. Effort withholding is defined as the likelihood that an individual will give less than full effort on a job-related task. While an extensive body of work demonstrates that effort withholding is prevalent in all types of teamwork, little attention has been paid to an IT project context. In this study, we surveyed 473 IT project managers to address two questions: 1) what are key IT project and organizational factors that influence effort withholding, and 2) which project management approaches can suppress it? Our results indicate that the size of the team, the perceived importance of the project, the degree of uncertainty in the project requirements, and the degree of self-interest (organizational ethical climate) all contribute to effort withholding, while internal integration (project coordination) techniques suppress it.