When Is a Steering Committee a Top Management Team? Governing Hybrid Projects at the Strategic Level

Abstract Book of the 16th International Conference on New Ideas in Management, Economics and Accounting

Year: 2026

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When Is a Steering Committee a Top Management Team? Governing Hybrid Projects at the Strategic Level

Matthäus Tobias Judkowiak

ABSTRACT:

Hybrid project management, which combines predictive and agile methods, shifts governance requirements to the organization’s strategic leadership (Hobbs & Petit, 2017; Lindskog & Netz, 2021). Companies are increasingly delegating these requirements to strategic steering committees, yet how these committees actually function has been scarcely studied to date (Stoppels et al., 2025). Furthermore, the concept of the top management team (TMT) is only vaguely defined, and its operationalization is often determined more by data availability than by theory (Krause et al., 2022). Whether a steering committee qualifies as a TMT in the sense of the highest level of leadership is therefore more of an open question than a certainty.
We take a conceptual approach to this topic. Rather than assuming that steering committees are synonymous with top management teams, we draw on the “upper echelons” theory (Hambrick & Mason, 1984; Hambrick, 2007) to examine when this designation applies, considering management’s discretion (Hambrick & Finkelstein, 1987) as the criterion that distinguishes strategic committees from purely operational ones. Since hybrid projects require a balance between exploitation and exploration, we draw on organizational ambidexterity (O’Reilly & Tushman, 2013) to identify four recurring tensions in corporate management: control, information, authority, and time. We then demonstrate how the degree of discretion a committee has influences the intensity with which each of these tensions is perceived and which coping strategies are available, including selective decoupling, switching between directive and facilitative leadership (Rosing et al., 2011), bridging reporting logics through artifacts, and informal coordination outside the formal committee (Jansen et al., 2009).
The framework reframes a definitional question as one of scope and provides testable hypotheses for research on project management at the highest strategic level.

Keywords: Steering Committees; Top Management Teams; Project Governance; Hybrid Project Management; Upper Echelons Theory