Boundary activities and readiness for ... - Projekti-Instituutti

Discussion
5.2.3 Program autonomy as a central enabler of change
One of the key findings of the study relates to the requirement for program
autonomy. During the empirical analysis, the concept of program autonomy
emerged from the research data and was included as one of three main
dimensions of readiness for change program implementation. This
autonomy was analyzed to consist of two aspects: the program’s legitimate
position in the organization, and the program actors’ authority to use the
resources and realize the planned changes.
During the past decade, the autonomy of projects and other temporary
organizations has attracted growing attention among the scholars of the
field. Previous research has described project autonomy (or a project team’s
autonomy) as its freedom to evolve without constant intervention by the
parent organization (Lampel & Jha, 2004), and as the project’s authority to
set its own goals, define its own identity and boundaries, its resources to
complement its task and its freedom to organize the behavior of its
members (Gemünden et al., 2005). Project autonomy has also been
depicted as a contextual factor that must be taken into account in defining a
project’s strategy (Artto, Kujala et al., 2008; Artto, Martinsuo et al., 2008).
Recent studies on project autonomy by Martinsuo and her colleagues
suggest that project autonomy appears in constant interplay with the
surrounding stakeholder environment, showing how the parent
organization enables and constrains project autonomy (Martinsuo &
Lehtonen, 2009) and how the project manager may have an active role in
shaping the project’s autonomy by regulating external integration
(Martinsuo, Aaltonen, & Lehtonen, 2010). Consistent with this view, the
current study proposes that the key managers of an emerging program
must actively promote program autonomy in cooperation with the parent
organization’s representatives.
While previous studies on project autonomy have provided inconclusive
evidence of the role of project autonomy in project success (Gemünden et
al., 2005; Hoegl & Parboteeah, 2006), the current study proposes
autonomy to be critical for the success of change programs in terms of
creating readiness for program implementation. This proposition is
supported by recent research that has suggested autonomy to be especially
relevant in innovative, novel, and complex projects (cf. Martinsuo &
Lehtonen, 2009). The present study suggests that program autonomy does
not readily exist but it must be actively produced, and the findings provide
empirical evidence of mechanisms for promoting autonomy during change
program initiation.
Based on the present findings, sufficient program autonomy means that
the program has the required authority to act, to use resources, and to
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