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Highlights• A theoretical framework for the interaction between vertical and horizontal leadership in projects.• Builds on the Archer's morphogenetic cycle to model structure and agency for project leadership.• Identifies the recursive cycles of nomination, identification, selection, execution & governance, and transitioning.• Empirical evidence from 166 interviews and a range of industries.

The contemporary discourse on organizational project management (OPM) complements project, program, and portfolio management with emerging elements, such as governance, projectification, the project management office (PMO), and organizational design. This creates the need for an integrated model that defines the content and roles in OPM. This article addresses this by conceptually developing a seven-layered model that organizes 22 OPM elements, ranging from the corporate level to the management of individual projects. A theory is developed to explain the interaction of the elements and the layers within the model.

Competitive advantages and access to competencies are among the most frequent motivations for developing various forms of collaborative relationships. While some firms claim to collaborate at a strategic level, as in joint ventures, others pursue collaboration at a micro level, as in projects. Collaborations at the project level involve a network of dispersed team members actively involved in common activities. This creates new challenges for effective decision making in distributed project teams, as processes are often ill adapted for facilitating collaborative work. Many researchers have studied aspects of these organizational problems. However, questions regarding team autonomy and decision-making processes remain largely underinvestigated. After reviewing the literature on key concepts related to organizational decision making, we conducted an empirical study using a quantitative approach that involved an online survey sent to project management professionals. The analysis of the data clearly indicates that success in managing distributed project teams is linked to team autonomy in conducting project activities and to formal decision-making processes. These findings also highlight the fact that a formal decision-making process is even more important for distributed teams that are highly dispersed.

Innovation portfolio management has been touted as a new dynamic capability following the evolution of team‐ and project‐based organizational forms. In this article, we conceptualize innovative dynamic capabilities as a multidimensional construct that comprises distinct but related aspects in managing innovation. We test our model, which links this capability to innovative performance by using survey data from a sample of 923 firms. We find empirical support for our conceptualization and its impact on firm innovative performance.