Abstract:

It is widely recognized by academics and the community of practice that the management of people plays an important role in project management, because it takes more than technical skills to become a successful project manager. Project managers need good and effective people skills to manage the people in their projects. There has been a considerable discussion throughout the history about what makes a good leader. Over the last 80 years there have been several main schools of leadership theory. A considerable body of research has been conducted on leadership styles, with two styles getting more interest than others. Those two leadership styles are transactional and transformational style, identified by Bass (1990). Muller and Turner (2007) concluded, that the transformational leadership style is preferred on complex change projects and a transactional style preferred on simple, engineering projects. To verify their conclusion about the transactional leadership, a study investigating leadership styles in 2 Czech engineering companies was conducted. In total, 72 completed questionnaires were obtained. The goal was to discover what kind of a leadership style is used by leaders in engineering companies and if the chosen style matches leader’s performance expectations.