Professor Jeff Pinto from Penn State University explores the topic of Normalisation of Deviance and the associated obstacles it presents.
Initiating and successfully managing projects in modern organisations continues to be a challenging and often frustrating undertaking, with clear deadlines, temporary teams of “strangers” across multiple disciplines, competing and often contradictory expectations from a variety of stakeholder groups, and sometimes uncertain technologies in operation.
In these challenging settings, organisation cultures also play a role in frustrating our best intentions by tacitly promoting and reinforcing a variety of destructive behaviours amongst project team members. These “deviant” activities typically occur as a response to poor oversight, unrealistic expectations, and the desire to “get things done” on the project. Over time, such behaviours become normalised and are simply assumed to be standard operating procedures, despite our awareness that many of these activities are fundamentally dangerous or flawed.
This webinar will examine the concept of normalisation of deviance (NoD) in projects, presenting our research on the methods for identifying the underlying causes of deviant behaviours, how we see (NoD) typically manifest itself, and some remedial actions that organisations can take to first recognise and subsequently, correct the behaviours and the culture that promotes them.
Speaker
Professor Jeff Pinto - Professor of Management, Project and Supply Chain Management and MPM programmes at Penn State University and the Andrew Morrow and Elizabeth Lee Black Chair in Management Technology. Professor Pinto's research interests include project management, information system implementation, power and political processes in organisations, and the diffusion of innovations. He teaches in the areas of project management, organisational behavior, and organisation theory.
