Leadership behaviors in project design offices

Abstract

Leadership may be defined as the ability to collect a group of people around definite objectives and the achievement of said objectives. An architectural design team needs a leader, and in this paper, the owner of the office is the formal leader. Leadership behaviors of employer architects are directly related to the performance of the design team; therefore, effective leadership is key to a successful design process. Data were collected through a questionnaire on leadership behaviors that was distributed to 40 architects from different design offices in Turkey. Leadership behaviors were gathered into two main groups-delegation of authority and managerial orientation. The significant positive correlations are between authoritarian and task-oriented leadership, and between participative, achievement-oriented and employee-oriented leadership. The position of leader-architects and the age and size of offices are directly related to leadership behaviors. The results show that although leaders of project design teams indicated that participation was important, they actually preferred task-oriented leadership. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CO.1943-7862.0000308. (C) 2011 American Society of Civil Engineers.