Experiencing Responsibility in the Context of Project Management

The notion of responsibility evokes the meaningassociated with the event or the expectation of having to respond or togive account for something, justifying one's actions or omissions.Experiencing responsibility, one feels a compulsion to do or notto do something, which influences actions, attitudes and performances.Responsibility plays an increasingly important role in our dailylife at work. That role is particularly evident in project management,as its surveillance-based management techniques, such asproject planning and control tools, functionaliseresponsibility through disciplinary processes, as an attempt to control whathappens in a project. The assumption underpinning those techniquesis that holding people to account for the completion of theirtasks (the passive form of responsibility), will influence thosepeople into taking active responsibility for how they areexpected to perform. Drawing on real experiences of participating inmanagement change projects, this book demonstrates how more complexwork dynamics emerge, associated with the diverse emotionalresponses to the experience of responsibility, such as shame, guilt orpride.