Abstract
Firms all over the world develop projects with strategic partners for efficient and effective management and pursuit of goals. It is a common practice to request outsourcing services from expert consultation firms, regarding business areas such as legal, financial, Information Technology (IT) and several others. Firms will normally engage in short-term period projects with experienced players from consultation firms for project deployment activities. This study focuses on the managerial challenges and aspects of developing an extrafirm project team on a provisional work-role with a long life-span, more specifically how do two firms –a consultation firm and its customer– manage a shared line-of-command for an on-site project team and how this team manage to adapt to this complex work environment. In-depth interviews were conducted with 16 IT professionals, 12 from the consultation firm and 1 from each customer involved. From these interviews, 4 case studies were developed as there are four customer firms involved in this research paper. All of the 12 interviewees from the consultation firm reported a transition shock of high magnitude during the initial stage of the project, while the interviewees from the customer side reported different managerial conflict strategies for the on-site team. The findings of this study suggest that macro-transitions may develop in functional to project unit transitions, when this transition is one of such a kind that it is done at a firm-to-firm level. This research further establishes a communication model to moderate the conflicts of the hybrid organizational identity in a project team between two firms.