The perception of difficulty in project-work planning and its impact on resource sharing

Managers both competent and willing to share resources can be critical to the performance of the multi-project settings increasingly common to modern organizations. Drawing on theoretical perspectives from the psychological ownership literature, we examine the impact of project manager (PM) task self-efficacy and perceptions of project work-planning difficulty on resource sharing behaviors. In this study we use a laboratory experiment involving practicing PMs to elicit work assignments for their subordinate team-members across a series of predefined projects. We control for the difficulty of these assignment tasks and follow-up by inquiring into the willingness of the PMs to share human resources that they’ve assigned to work in these projects. The results from the experiment involving 161 professional PMs suggest that difficulty in project work-planning in general has a significant impact on sharing behaviors. Consistent with the implications of psychological ownership theory, this relationship is significantly moderated by project managers’ task self-efficacy. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.