Drawing on the rationale of positive and negative energy (Henri, 2006; Simons, 1995), the organic form of control, stimulating the generation of new ideas, represents a positive force when OC is used to expand opportunity seeking and learning within and throughout the project. It represents a negative force when used to mold team members’ actions to predetermined goals and curb what is deemed excessive innovation activity. Likewise, the mechanistic form of project control, including monitoring, coordinating and focusing on pre-set goals and correcting performance deviations from those goals, may represent both positive and negative forces. The focus on deviations may provide a negative or positive feedback signal to the project manager, and the possible corrective
actions undertaken will be either positive or negative, i.e.the reverse of the feedback signal to correct the innovation
process