Assessing the impact of leadership, team building, and team member characteristics in creating high performance project teams

Interviews of project team members about factors that lead to high levels of team performance were used to create a survey that was given to 151 project teams in the engineering and construction industry. The survey focused on project team leader behaviors, use of team building, and team member characteristics as predictors of project cost and schedule performance. Controlling for use of industry best practices, leader behaviors were found to be significant predictors of project cost performance, while neither team building nor team member characteristics were found to be significant predictors of performance.