Switch Leadership in Projects An Empirical Study Reflecting the Importance of Transformational Leadership on Project Success across Twenty Eight Nations

“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. ” Mahatma Gandhi This paper documents an empirical analysis of leadership in project management practices on 153 projects across 28 nations. This is a two-phase research study for which 46 projects were studied in phase 1 representing 14 nations and 107 projects were examined in phase 2 originating from 25 nations. The main purpose of this research is to study the importance of project leadership and team related factors and enlist the factors that play a pivotal role in achieving project success. It is a multinational and thus multicultural research study that represents the present day project environment, which is highly multicultural and multidisciplinary. The results from the analysis of data obtained from phase 1 lead to the development of the phase 2 questionnaires that further explores the links between different leadership aspects and project success as pointed out in the phase 1. At the end the author provides a tentative and suggestive list of factors displaying the impact of critical leadership factors on project success using