Temporary or transformative? How actors shape the organizational implications of projects

Projects are widely used to address complex organizational challenges, yet we still know relatively little about how actors experience and enact their temporariness and how this affects their organizational implications. Drawing on two qualitative case studies, we show that it is not project temporariness itself, but how actors frame and mobilize it in practice, that shapes whether project activities become connected to broader organizational processes. We identify two temporal mechanisms—working with temporariness (via temporal practices of reframing, adaptation, and elasticity) and dealing with temporariness (via rigidity and deferral)—that explain how project participants engage with project time and influence the organizational implications of temporary initiatives. By specifying these mechanisms and the conditions under which they foster or limit the emergence of microfoundations for organizational capability development, the study contributes to research on project temporality and temporary organizing, and offers insights into how temporary projects may support longer-term organizational adaptation.