An Investigation of the leadership styles of contractor’s project manager towards sustainable development in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Sustainable development (SD) become common requirements of entire world, all economic based developments are expected to deliver as a project, among them construction industry is playing a major role, also it is one of biggest industry that consume high amount of resource from the nature and return high amount of waste to it. Therefore, SD development concept in construction industry is a mandatory requirement, Sri Lanka is country which expecting high economic development through infrastructure development, hence, to achieve it construction industry SD focus to be considered as a basic requirement. All the developments are executed as projects. Hence project manager is the leader who led the project and the team. Accordingly, his/her project management leadership style and behavioural pattern will impact the project deliverable. There are three types of leadership styles such as transactional, transformational, and laissez-faire. In this research it was focused on the required leadership styles to achieve the SD in Sri Lankan construction industry, for that the data was collected from contractors’ top management and team members through semi structured interview and questionnaire survey respectively. From the collected data and analysis, it was concluded that Sri Lankan project managers are having Transactional behavioural pattern, but in Sri Lanka to get SD construction industry Transformational leadership style is required and it is shows positive results in the SD deliverables.