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.

Table of Contents
ABSTRACT ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii
LIST OF TABLES vi
LIST OF FIGURES vi
ABBREVIATION DICTIONARY vii
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2
2.1 CONCEPT OF TRANSITION ROLES 2
2.1.1 Transition Roles 2
2.1.2 Rotations in Provisional Job Assignments as Work Role Transitions 3
2.1.3 The Socialization and Resocialization processes 4
2.2 THE ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE MANAGEMENT 5
2.2.1 Organization Culture Behavior 5
2.2.2 The OB Conflict Management 7
2.2.3 The Matrix Organization Structure 9
2.3 PROJECT MANAGEMENT FROM THE IT PERSPECTIVE 10
2.3.1 IT Project Management Success 10
2.3.2 Hard Skills versus Soft Skills 11
2.4 SUMMARY 12
CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHOD 13
3.1 RESEARCH OBJECTIVES 13
3.2 RESEARCH DESIGN: QUALITATIVE APPROACH AND MULTIPLE-CASE STUDY RESEARCH 13
3.2.1 Qualitative Approach 13
3.2.1 Case Study Design 14
CHAPTER 4: THE CASE STUDIES 17
4.1 CASE STUDY 1: Financial Institution AF 17
4.2 CASE STUDY 2: Financial Institution BF 20
4.3 CASE STUDY 3: Financial Institution CF 24
4.4 CASE STUDY 4: Home Appliances Firm DH 27
CHAPTER 5: CROSS-DATA ANALYSIS 31
5.1 THE GENERAL PERCEPTIONS 31
5.2 THE FIRM LANDSCAPE AND CONFLICT MANAGEMENT STRATEGY 32
5.3 MANAGERIAL CHALLENGES PRESENTED BY THE CASES 33
CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSIONS 37
6.1 RESEARCH FINDINGS AND CONTRIBUTION TO THE THEORY 37
6.2 RESEARCH LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH 37
REFERENCES 39
APPENDIX 42

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