Governance representations in temporary organization: a case of
governance sensemaking
Magali Simarda*, Danielle Labergea
aÉcole des sciences de la gestion, Département de management et technologies,Université du Québec à Montréal,Case Postale 8888, Succursale
Centre-ville, Montreal H3C 3P8, Canada
Abstract
In current literature, the formal project governance often stops at the steering committee, which is usually directed by the project
sponsor. Normally, Top managers act as project sponsors and play an active role until the project is approved and launched.
Afterwards, the project usually gets delegated for its execution. This delegation enables middle-managers and supervisors to
participate in the operationalization and the monitoring of the project strategy coming from top managers. As such, they are
likely to take part in the project governance, which needs operationalization as much as the project does. Thus, they are included
in the project governance zone, which reports to the steering committee.
In this study, we are interested by this governance zone, and our focus is on a specific liaison device in this zone: the Project
Coordination Committee, which has rarely been studied. We also explore how this governance zone gets represented by the
project's participants. Our results show a surprising diversity in their representations. This allows us to identify a number of
conclusions that go beyond the governance forms issues and relates to the complexity and influence of this governance zone on
the disruptions between permanent and temporary governance structures within a large organization.
© 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committees of CENTERIS/ProjMAN/HCIST 2014
Keywords: Project Governance; Temporary Organization; Project Coordination Committee; Sensemaking;
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: simard.magali@courrier.uqam.ca
© 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license