A project leaves behind more than an output: it can strengthen or damage the relationships the organisation will need next time.
A project team is assembled, works intensely for eighteen months and disbands after delivery. The formal structure disappears. Yet some of its most valuable consequences remain.
Engineers who had never worked together now call each other directly. A supplier and operations team understand each other's constraints. A project manager knows which specialist will challenge assumptions early. Trust has either increased or deteriorated. The next cross-functional initiative will inherit these relationships even if none of them appears on the close-out report.
This is why the end of a project is not the end of its organisational effect.
The Strategic Context
Braun, Ferreira and Sydow examined organisational citizenship behaviour in temporary organisations using data from 247 project managers and workers. Citizenship behaviour describes voluntary, useful behaviours that are not fully captured by formal role obligations. In the project setting, the study considered dimensions such as initiative, loyalty, compliance, helping behaviour and relationship maintenance.
The research is important because projects are temporary structures embedded in permanent organisations and wider networks. Their formal purpose may be delivery, but their social consequences can outlast termination.
The study found that different citizenship behaviours were associated with different aspects of effectiveness. No single behaviour predicted every outcome, and the proposed positive effect on schedule adherence was not supported in the regression tests. However, several behaviours were associated with overall project success, and initiative and helping behaviour were associated with future relationship quality. The researchers also found unexpected duration effects: for some outcomes, citizenship behaviour had a stronger relationship with effectiveness in shorter rather than longer projects.
The findings are nuanced, which is precisely why they are useful. Collaboration matters, but not as a generic slogan.
What Leaders Commonly Misread
The first misread is that project success ends at acceptance. That frame captures delivery but misses what the project did to the organisation's capacity to collaborate again.
The second is that “soft” behaviour is separate from performance. Helping a colleague solve a cross-boundary problem, voluntarily sharing information or maintaining relationships can affect how quickly the project handles coordination that no formal procedure anticipated.
The third is that strong process removes the need for discretionary behaviour. Complex projects always encounter situations the procedure did not specify perfectly.
The fourth is that longer projects naturally create stronger relationships. Braun and colleagues found the opposite moderation pattern for several effectiveness relationships in their sample. Temporary intensity can sometimes mobilise high levels of discretionary effort quickly.
Reframing the Issue
A project should be treated as both a delivery system and a temporary social infrastructure.
The first produces outputs and outcomes.
The second creates a residue of trust, reciprocity, informal networks, shared language and knowledge of how other parts of the organisation actually work.
That residue can become future organisational capability.
Related article: From Outputs to Enterprise Value: The Strategy-to-Delivery Chain
Relational Capital Reduces Future Coordination Cost
Every cross-functional project pays a coordination tax. People need to learn who owns what, which information can be trusted, how quickly other functions respond, where authority really sits and which issues require escalation.
When relationships survive the project, part of that cost does not need to be paid again.
This can matter in project-intensive organisations where teams repeatedly re-form around new products, customer programs, transformation initiatives or engineering problems. A network of people who have already built trust can move faster than a formally perfect team of strangers.
The strategic value is not friendship. It is lower friction in future coordination.
Citizenship Behaviour Is Not Free Labour
Leaders should be careful not to romanticise extra-role behaviour.
If the organisation depends on people continually doing unpaid, unrecognised or unsustainable work outside their roles, that is not citizenship. It is weak operating design.
The useful distinction is between discretionary cooperation and systemic role overload.
A project member who voluntarily helps another function solve an unexpected problem can create value. A project system that routinely succeeds only because people work around broken interfaces is consuming goodwill as a substitute for management.
This is especially important because the definition of citizenship behaviour rests on discretion. Once an “extra” behaviour becomes an unspoken requirement for survival, leaders should redesign the role or process.
Decision Framework: Measure the Relational Residue
At project closure, add a relational lens to the conventional review.
1. Trust
Which relationships became more reliable? Where did trust deteriorate? Focus on work-relevant trust: willingness to share bad news, depend on commitments and challenge assumptions.
2. Collaboration pathways
Who can now work directly across functions, suppliers or organisational boundaries without rebuilding basic context?
3. Knowledge bridges
Which people now understand more than one part of the system and can translate between technical, commercial, operational or customer perspectives?
4. Reciprocity
Did the project create a pattern of mutual support, or did one group continually carry another?
5. Future mobilisation
If a related strategic issue emerged tomorrow, which relationships from this project would allow the organisation to assemble an effective response faster?
The objective is not to score human relationships mechanically. It is to make visible a category of organisational value that conventional close-out measures ignore.
From Strategy to Execution
Immediate action is to add three questions to project close-out: Which relationships should be preserved? Which cross-boundary connections are now strategically useful? Which relationship failures should not be repeated?
Medium-term capability building means designing communities, rotations, lessons networks and future assignments so that useful project relationships are not lost when the structure dissolves. This is particularly important where scarce specialists repeatedly move between initiatives.
Long-term strategic positioning involves recognising that project-intensive enterprises compete partly through their ability to repeatedly assemble temporary organisations. The quality of the relational network between projects therefore becomes part of enterprise capability, not merely culture.
Signals to Monitor
Warning signs include teams repeatedly rebuilding the same cross-functional relationships from zero, project close-outs that capture documents but not networks, recurring conflict between the same functions, high-performing individuals who become isolated because they are moved too frequently, and project success achieved through exhaustion or continual workarounds.
Positive signals include former project members voluntarily seeking each other for future work, faster cross-functional mobilisation, greater willingness to disclose problems early and a growing pool of people who can bridge organisational boundaries.
References
- Braun, T., Ferreira, A.I. & Sydow, J. 2013, 'Citizenship behavior and effectiveness in temporary organizations', International Journal of Project Management, vol. 31, no. 6, pp. 862–876.
Questions for the Leadership Team
- What useful relationships did our last major project leave behind?
- Which projects repeatedly recreate coordination problems the organisation has already solved elsewhere?
- Are we mistaking discretionary cooperation for a sustainable operating model?
- Which people have become valuable bridges across functions or organisational boundaries?
- Do our close-out processes capture relational learning as well as technical lessons?
- How could future project staffing deliberately reuse proven collaboration without creating closed networks?
Closing Perspective
Projects are temporary. Organisational consequences are not. Leaders who judge a project only by the asset, system or deliverable it produced miss part of the return on the investment. A well-run project can leave the enterprise easier to coordinate, faster to mobilise and more capable of working across boundaries. A poorly run one can leave the opposite. Relational capital is not a substitute for delivery performance. It is part of what delivery performance can create.
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