The Effects of Intra-Organizational Agency Problems on is Project Alignment

Information system (IS) project strategy alignment is considered a solution to overcome the challenges involved in IT strategy implementation and a requirement for the realization of business-IT alignment. Evidently, IS project failure is often not the result of lacking or ineffective project management practices but of inappropriate social interactions among project stakeholders or – in other words – limited project-social congruence (PSC). However, little research has been conducted with regard to the PSC dimension. Existing models and theories fail to explain problems, such as goal conflicts and project stakeholders’ opportunistic behavior, and the reasons for their emergence. We hold that agency theory is the most suitable theory to explain such phenomena and subsequently use this theory to explore the interactions between the different project stakeholders. We seek to identify the intra-organizational project agency relationships and problems as well as the triggers for the emergence of such problems in order to investigate how organizations respond to agency problems and to explain these responses. We use an explorative multi-case study approach to theory generation and identify two transitive agency relationships that affect IS project strategy alignment. We expand IS project alignment literature by investigating agency problems in the context of IS project alignment.