This study assesses the effectiveness of an IT project team's direct persuasion behaviors in obtaining management support. The literature
typically suggests that obtaining management support is critical for IT project success. The literature also generally prescribes cognition-based
approaches to obtaining such support, ignoring the potential effect of emotion on influencing management. We employ organizational influence
theory to identify direct persuasion strategies and posit that both cognitive involvement and emotional involvement mediate the effectiveness of
influence strategies on management support. Our argument was tested on a survey of non-MIS managers who recently undertook large IT projects.
Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of two persuasion behaviors applied by the project team to obtain management support. Both persuasion
behaviors encourage management support by increasing management's cognitive and emotional involvement in the project. We find that emotional
involvement has a stronger effect than cognitive involvement on management support. Important implications for theory and practice are
discussed.