Projects are emotional : How project managers' emotional awareness can influence decisions and behaviours in projects

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to offer insights into how emotions can influence project manager behaviours and decisions specifically within the context of undertaking their roles in relationship management in projects. It shows that the emotional awareness of project managers may be a factor that helps to explain how project managers may arrive at decisions that affect their inter‐personal relationships on projects. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is set within the context of follow‐up interviews conducted with 15 project managers who attended emotional intelligence training that provided in‐depth, rich qualitative data that was collected making use of a critical incident technique, and analysed using a semi‐emergent theme approach. Findings – The data suggest that project managers are consistently subject to emotion generating situations during project management and their emotional awareness plays a part in determining how they potentially respond to the emotional information generated. Emotional awareness was found to be particularly significant in underpinning decisions and behaviours that were likely to affect the subsequent pattern of inter‐personal relationships in projects. Originality/value – The impact of emotions in projects has received minimal attention in the literature to date. The findings suggest that project managers may respond differently in similar emotion generating circumstances dependent upon their levels of emotional awareness. This would help explain the limitations of a strictly rational and functionalist approach to fully account for effective project management practice.