Managing the political context in PMS organizations

Through the use of questionnaires to CEOs of aerospace firms, data were collected on thirteen organizational factors hypothesized as related to the level of internal politics. These factors included: the degree of stakeholder representation in the goal structure, the strategic information search process, the degree to which strategic assumptions are challenged, the clarity, measurability, prioritizing, difficulty, awareness and time congruity of organizational goals, the level of participative decision making, and the degree to which the budgeting process and the performance evaluation and reward systems are linked to organizational goals. Support was found for all the hypotheses except the prioritizing of goals. The implications for using these findings to manage the political context within which projects must operate are then developed and discussed.