Comportamento dos patrocinadores dos projetos e a escolha da modalidade de contratação na perspectiva da teoria dos custos de transação

Abstract

Despite the comprehensive literature on contracts, the choice of contract type and the impact on project costs remain largely unexplored - specially for implementation projects on IT corporate solutions (IT Ess). The aim of this research is to identify how sponsor's profiles can influence the contract type selection on their projects. Transaction Costs Theory is used as lens to analyze contract management relations, especially Fixed Price and Time-and-Material modalities. In-depth interviews were carried out with senior Brazilian companies’ executives to help depict the contract management approaches. Qualitative approach was used (Atlas.Ti supported) to analyze data collected from such interviews, followed by the coding process with the constant comparison technique. As a result, this research demonstrated the project sponsor’s effective participation during the contract conception stage. Considering that current literature usually considers the impacts of sponsors from the project execution phase, this research empirically demonstrates that the involvement and potential impact of sponsor´s influences are present at the initial stages of those projects. From the sponsors’ perspective, the preference for Fixed-Price contract type is related to the desire to transfer risk to service provider, thus decreasing project failure estimate. The main contributions of this research are: first, to construct a conceptual map showing how the relationships of executive sponsors - including their personal characteristics - can directly influence the project governance in choosing a contract type for their respective projects and finally, provide a better understanding of the characteristics of opportunism and related transaction costs in the project management environment.