Understanding the Organizational Antecedents of Bottom-Up Un-Enacted Projects : Towards a Conceptual Model Based on Deviance Theory

Titelangaben

Buchwald, Arne ; Urbach, Nils ; Ahlemann, Frederik:
Understanding the Organizational Antecedents of Bottom-Up Un-Enacted Projects : Towards a Conceptual Model Based on Deviance Theory.
In: Proceedings of the 22nd European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS). - Tel Aviv, Israel , 2014
ISBN 978-0-9915567-0-0

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Abstract

Un-enacted projects are those projects that have not been officially evaluated by the project portfolio management but do exist although they are not known to a company’s project portfolio. As a consequence, resources thought to be available often prove to be actually unavailable and that unofficial initiatives eventually compete for scarce resources. One particular type of these un-enacted projects are bottom-up initiatives. Bottom-up un-enacted projects are unofficial initiatives on which employees spend time without order but with which they intend to benefit their organizations. While previous research highlights the great potential of bottom-up un-enacted projects, they only focus on the individual level but leave the organizational level for further research. To address this research gap, this study aims at gaining a deeper understanding of the organizational drivers of bottom-up un-enacted projects. We draw on deviance theory to develop a conceptual model for explaining the occurrence of these projects. In order to triangulate the emerging model with insights from practice, we use interview data to cross-check and refine the theory-driven model. Our results advance the theoretical discourse on the concept of un-enacted projects and enable practitioners to understand the levers with which to steer respective activities in the intended direction