Informal Coordination in Project Teams : How Mutual Adjustment Contributes to Accountability, Predictability, and Common Understanding

Sammanfattning

In this study, we examine how mutual adjustment contributes to the development of thecoordination conditions accountability, predictability, and common understanding withinproject teams. We explore how coordination is achieved through informal interaction instudent-led project teams. We follow an interpretivist research philosophy and apply aqualitative research design based on semi-structured interviews with project managers fromstudent committees at Jönköping University. The empirical material was analysed through anabductive thematic analysis and structured through a hierarchical analytical process.Our findings suggest that mutual adjustment contributes to coordination through recurringinteractional concepts. In addition, we identified relational coordination, real-time adaptation,and higher-order linkages as broader enabling patterns supporting coordination within thecommittees. Another finding suggests that the relationship between mutual adjustment andcoordination conditions is not linear, but recursive, as accountability, predictability, andcommon understanding are both developed through mutual adjustment and simultaneouslyenable further forms of mutual adjustment over time.Overall, our study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of coordination in project-basedenvironments by showing how mutual adjustment contributes to the coordination conditions.