Value Can Personal Projects Can Bring to Organizational Projects

We examine how people who have personal project experience compare with managers of organizational projects and what value they can bring. This is an important question because at times organizations and theorists assume that guest clients will automatically understand modus operandi of organizations and readily adapt to their culture and processes, which is not necessarily the case. We discover a fit between the two groups on three core variables — Efficient Planning, Togetherness, and Quality—, which means that managers can plan their activities to include guest clients with personal experiences in, for example, R&D projects or even in regular operations, and that less control is needed given these commonalities. Through five studies, we show that togetherness is a good-to-have element in the flow between Efficient Planning and Quality. We propose that performance in enhanced when operations are planned to maximize the value of guest clients who have personal project experience.