Distributed Leadership in Projects: The Contributions of Stakeholders Dicle Kortantamer 1 Abstract This article examines how stakeholders contribute to leading a project. Using a longitudinal study o ...

---

Distributed Leadership in Projects:
The Contributions of Stakeholders
Dicle Kortantamer 1
Abstract
This article examines how stakeholders contribute to leading a project. Using a longitudinal study of a project embedded in a
public project portfolio, the article uncovers a leadership con?guration in which project portfolio and project actors come
together in four patterns: top-down in?uence, transactional exchange, pooled leadership, and co-leadership. This con?guration
reveals integrated leadership units, the possibility of senior managers to both constrain and channel project manager contribu-
tions, and a wider variety of leadership patterns in horizontal and vertical relationships. These insights offer a more comprehen-
sive account of distributed leadership that contributes to the development of leadership capacity in projects.
Keywords
project leadership, project portfolio management, institutional and organizational context
Introduction
Mainstream project leadership literature has, for decades,
sought to identify the leadership competencies, behaviors, and
styles that make a project manager effective in shaping the rela-
tional work in projects, and thereby, achieving the aspired out-
comes (Bilal et al., 2021; Briner et al., 1996; Brion et al., 2012;
Dong & Götz, 2020; Lundy & Morin, 2013; Maqbool et al.,
2017; Müller & Turner, 2010). In recognition of the dif?culties
for an individual to ful?ll all leadership demands in the face of
complexity (Pearce & Conger, 2002), a relatively small but
growing body of research has emerged that shifts the focus
from developing the leadership capacity of the project
manager to developing the leadership capacity within the
project team (Hoegl & Muethel, 2016; Hsu et al., 2017;
Müller et al., 2018; Scott-Young et al., 2019). This alternative
line of inquiry has examined the ways in which the project
team members may complement the leadership of the project
manager.
This article suggests that, while the idea of distributing lead-
ership within a project team is important, it is crucially incom-
plete in terms of its neglect of the potential contributions to
leadership that may be made by other stakeholders dispersed
vertically and horizontally within the?rm and beyond. A
handful of research that attends to this omission has posited
that actor categories, such as the portfolio manager, senior man-
agers, and external stakeholders, may help lead a project (Cao
et al., 2021; Kissi et al., 2013; Wellman, 2007). Yet, it has
not gone far enough to provide a holistic understanding of dis-
tributed leadership. Crucially, it has not explained how the rela-
tionships between stakeholders and project actors may shapethe contributions these actors make individually or together,
and suf?ciently differentiated between vertically and horizon-
tally dispersed stakeholders. This limits the potential of the
project management literature to understand and guide the
development of leadership capacity in p