Extending the IT Risk Control Framework: Incorporating the Role of Team Personality

Many information technology (IT) projects fail to deliver the promised value within the initial budget and the estimated schedule. These shortfalls materialize in part due to unaddressed project risks. The IT project risk and control literature has demonstrated that process controls can alleviate the adverse effects of technical IT project risks on project outcomes. However, the literature has yet to investigate why certain IT project teams respond better than others to process controls. To fill this gap, we extend the IT risk control framework of Venkatesh et al. (2018) by integrating the contingent role of team personality, which includes two meta-traits based on the Big Five personality traits: team stability (conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability) and team plasticity (extroversion, openness to experience). We conducted a field study of 424 offshore unique IT projects, comprising 4,516 unique project team members, to test our model. We found that, in general, teams with a higher level of stability respond better to internal process control, and teams with a higher level of plasticity respond better to external process control. We discuss further nuances of the three-way interactions of technology (technical risks), process (process controls), and people (team personality), and their effects on product and process performance. Our work thus contributes to the IT project management literature by extending the nomological network of IT project risk and control and incorporating the people aspect into this framework. In addition, it outlines how the consideration of team personality can assist managers in better deploying process controls to achieve IT project success.