Abstract/Summary

The current thesis focuses on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system implementations, investigating the significance of ERP managers’ leadership competences on perceived client satisfaction and how the ERP context moderates that relationship. It reviews the impact of contextual problems and the hurdles to be circumvented during the implementation and their influence on ERP leaders’ ability to achieve perceived client satisfaction. In doing so, the current study attempts to remedy the dearth of literature considering context in relation to ERP leadership and client satisfaction; moreover, adding further support to the foundations of the Contingency Theory - applied in the ERP context - by proposing a model of ERP leadership competence-based theory of perceived client satisfaction. As noted by Saxena and McDonagh (2019) user perception and user satisfaction are considered highly crucial for implementation success in both research literature (Chevers, 2018; Mekadmi and Louati, 2018) and by implementing organisations (Sumner, 2018). Likewise, a considerable amount of research has been conducted into critical success factors, or CSFs, for ERP implementations (e.g. Holland & Light, 1999; Sumner, 1999; Willcocks & Sykes, 2000; Ram & Corkindale, 2014; Costa, Ferreira & Aparicio, 2016; Vargas & Comuzzi, 2019). However, for the current research it has been identified that bringing context into the picture will help to focus such discussions and help converge findings to much more generalisable and useable outcomes and proposals. The ERP implementation train, due to its heavy dependence on Business and Information Technology (IT) skills, would typically have onboard, a diverse multicultural people, a disparate set of processes and several unrelated traditional systems and technologies, all led and driven along the implementation journey by the manager, usually referred to as: project manager, program manager, implementation manager, project leader, and other possible names based on the role definitions set out for a particular implementation. The implementation would normally play out within the organisational dynamics of the day, referred to in the current work as the ERP implementation context. The research employs a quantitative approach. An initial pilot study was conducted, using six semi-structured interviews with ERP program and project management practitioners in Sweden, Germany, Canada, United States and the United Kingdom. The six interviewees were all experienced program and project managers who have managed ERP implementations for several years. Each interview took roughly one hour. The aim of the study was to generate vi insights from practitioners to be used in building preliminary constructs for the concepts in the research model, such as the ERP implementation context, managers’ competences and client satisfaction. Results from the pilot study were used as a basis for development of the latter questionnaire distributed to gather data on managers’ leadership competences, ERP implementation context and perceived client satisfaction. In all, 83 responses were further analysed to test the hypotheses using quantitative analysis techniques including factor analysis and moderated hierarchical regression analysis. The results indicate that the competences: Emotional Intelligence, Leadership Performance, Follower Commitment, Team and Peer Cooperation and Project Management Knowledge are significant predictors of Perceived Client Satisfaction (PCSAT), with Follower Commitment as the strongest predictor of PCSAT. No significant effects were noted for Delivery Capabilities and Offshore Team Relations. The research also found that moderators: Resource Availability Problems, Cultural problems and External Partnership Problems showed highly significant impacts on the strength of the relationship between the independent variables and the dependent variable with Resource Availability problems showing significance across three of the moderated regression analyses carried out. However, cultural problems showed the highest singular significance as a moderator on the relationship between Follower commitment and Perceived Client Satisfaction. The study adds further support to the foundations of Contingency theory by providing a Model of ERP Leadership-Competence-based Theory of Perceived Client Satisfaction. It is expected that further contributions may be found when harnessing the outcomes of the study to develop required leadership competences to positively affect and tackle problems arising from an ERP implementation context. Furthermore, as follower commitment is illuminated as a highly important antecedent to perceived client satisfaction, to use this information to both select implementation team members and to influence the commitment of the team positively.