The Corruption of Project Governance Through Normalization of Deviance

Abstract

Organizational mistakes and accidents have a long history in practice and have been studied extensively in the engineering and organizational literature. One of the primary causes of persistent organizational error is the existence of deviance; i.e., behavior violating organizational norms. We examined the behaviors and motivations of project team members in situations where deviant behaviors had been accepted and normalized as part of project operations. We used NVivo content analysis to classify the narratives of 52 project professionals as they related to Normalization of Deviance (NoD) situations, their perceived causes, and subsequent outcomes for their organizations. Our findings suggest that NoD occurs in three primary dimensions: project processes, relationships, and outcomes. We discuss the implications of these findings for project organization performance improvement and avoiding NoD situations. MANAGERIAL RELEVANCE STATEMENTNormalization of deviance (NoD) is defined as a state whereby people within the organization become so accustomed to deviant behavior that they no longer even view it as deviant, despite the fact that these practices exceed their own rules for the elementary safety. In practical terms, it represents behaviors that can lead to a number of significant problems with project development and delivery, as cultural failures and flawed governance permit and normalize the patterns of destructive actions by key stakeholders that are counter-productive to organizational expectations. Our goal was to offer real-world examples and highlight areas where NoD in projects occur so that organizations can recognize the underlying conditions as well the warning signs in order to avoid their negative impact. Project performance will be IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management,

Reassessing project practices, research, and theory in a post-Covid reality

“…The question currently being asked regarding this potentially "new" project manager relates to the most effective role they can take on. For example, recent work has begun to explore new perspective on project leadership, including examining it from an agency perspective [3,24], stewardship theory [11,12], and so forth. What exactly will describe the role of future project managers, especially under the flattened hierarchies we noted above, remains to be seen but it seems clear that leadership itself will undergo significant reconsideration.…”

“…The practices underlying Normalization of Deviance (NoD) have been variously defined in the literature, but I am going to adopt an amalgam of definitions that suggest it is best understood as a corruption of project governance [12,35] through a gradual weakening of control systems, a willingness to look the other way in the face of poor practices, and the creation of perverse reward systems that implicitly encourage misbehaviour [20]. These mindsets become institutionalized over time to the point where members of the organization are aware that they occur, realize they are not optimal, but have become inured to their potential dangers and continue practicing them.…”