Research has found that a project manager's experience is a driver of project performance. However, whether specialist or generalist project managers are more effective remains an open question to date. In this paper, we examine how project managers' breadth of experience influences project completion time under different levels of project complexity. Using longitudinal data from 9,765 enterprise resource planning (ERP) system projects executed by a software services organization, we find that managers' breadth of experience has a U-shaped impact on project completion time. We also find that while we can identify an optimal level of breadth of experience that minimizes project completion time on the U-curve, this optimal level becomes lower (the U-curve shifts to the left) as project complexity increases. As project complexity decreases, the U-curve flattens and tends to become monotonically decreasing, signifying that diseconomies from project managers' breadth of experience are less apparent in simpler projects. From a practical standpoint, these findings suggest that project managers' breadth of experience is a critical driver of project performance that should be a key consideration in the selection of managers to lead knowledge work, especially for complex projects.

中文翻译：

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项目经理的经验广度、项目复杂性和项目绩效

研究发现，项目经理的经验是项目绩效的驱动因素。然而，迄今为止，专家项目经理还是通才项目经理更有效仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。在本文中，我们研究了项目经理的经验广度如何影响不同项目复杂程度下的项目完成时间。使用来自软件服务组织执行的 9,765 个企业资源规划 (ERP) 系统项目的纵向数据，我们发现管理人员的经验广度对项目完成时间有 U 形影响。我们还发现，虽然我们可以确定在 U 型曲线上最小化项目完成时间的最佳经验广度水平，但随着项目复杂性的增加，该最佳水平会降低（U 型曲线向左移动）。随着项目复杂性的降低，U 型曲线趋于平坦并趋于单调递减，这表明项目经理经验广度的不经济在更简单的项目中不那么明显。从实践的角度来看，这些发现表明，项目经理的经验广度是项目绩效的关键驱动因素，在选择领导知识工作的经理时，尤其是对于复杂项目，这应该是一个关键考虑因素。