Team resilience as an emergent phenomenon: an empirical study of the relationship between team resilient behaviors and IT project success

Abstract: Organizations and societies are turning to Information Technology to help safeguard the future, yet most IT projects reportedly fail due to increasing complexity. Resilience research offers promising insights into how teams can influence their capacity to positively adapt to challenges and achieve greater project success. Definitional debate has extensively focused on individual-level abilities and recently shifted towards exploring team-level resilience as an emergent phenomenon. Due to the recency of theoretical development, there is a lack of empirical studies that have validated and assessed team resilience. Alliger et al. (2015) define team resilience as a three-dimensional construct in the framework of team behaviors that occur either before (to mitigate), during (to manage) and/or after (to recover from) an adverse event. This study empirically explores the relationship between these three dimensions as they relate to project success using an online-based survey of 59 IT professionals. The results reveal that all three dimensions of team resilient behaviors positively correlate with IT project success. However, further exploring the variables using stepwise regression, the analysis indicates that the most important team resilient behaviors for our sample are those that occur during (to manage) adversity. The present study is one of few empirical studies on the framework expanding the research on team resilience in IT projects. Implications for studying team resilience as an emergent phenomenon, along with recommendations for future research are discussed.