Project leadership revisited: towards distributed leadership perspectives in project research

While project management research in general has become a rapidly expanding field during past decades, scientific inquiry into project leadership has not been a major issue. The extant literature on project leadership also does not make much use of the current developments in leadership research in general – not even those appearing as suitable, such as distributed leadership perspectives. The aim of the paper is threefold: (1) to review the existing research literature on project leadership, (2) to summarise and discuss this research and (3) to make some notes towards a new research agenda built on the current debate in leadership studies on distributed leadership perspectives. Current project leadership research is found to focus exclusively on individuals and their leadership competencies rather than the leadership practices in project settings and does not fully use the perspectives in current leadership research. We then outline a distributed leadership perspective on project leadership research, including the practical consequences of such an ideal and the basic assumptions for future research.