Enacting Clan Control in Complex IT Projects: A Social Capital Perspective

The IT project control literature has documented that clan control is often essential in complex multi-stakeholder projects for project success. However, instituting clan control in such conditions is challenging as people come to a project with diverse skills and backgrounds. There is often insufficient time for clan control to develop naturally. This paper investigates the question, “How can we enact clan control in complex IT projects?” Recognizing social capital as a resource, we conceptualize a clan as a group with strong social capital, i.e., where its members have developed their structural, cognitive, and relational ties to the point that they share common values and beliefs and are committed to a set of peer norms. We theorize that the enactment of clan control is a dual process of (1) building the clan by developing its social capital dimensions (structural, cognitive, and relational ties) or transferring social capital from elsewhere; and (2) leveraging the clan – by reinforcing project-facilitating shared values, beliefs and norms, and inhibiting those that impede the achievement of project goals. We explore how clan control was enacted in a large IT project at a major logistics organization in which clan control was quickly instituted to avoid an impending project failure. Our findings corroborate the notion that, properly structured, the enactment of clan control can be accelerated in complex multi-stakeholder IT projects. In addition, we find that formal authority plays a critical role in enabling the enactment of clan control.