Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of stress in demonstrating adequate project leadership and ultimately achieving project success, while also respecting followers’ expertise as the most important context factor. During 2021, the empirical research was conducted on 71 project managers in the Republic of Croatia. Results obtained via SPSS Statistics 23.0 and PROCESS macro v4.0 for SPSS indicate that demonstrated project leadership and followers’ expertise positively affect the project’s success. According to the results, stress, due to its inverted U-shaped nature of effect, does not affect project success, whereas it has a negative moderation effect on demonstrated project leadership by reducing its positive effects on project success. In addition to these results, this paper offers other interesting insights into the relationships between demonstrated project leadership, project manager’s stress, and project success, further filling the identified gap in research. A relatively small sample of project managers and its cross-sectional nature stand out as the main limitations of the empirical research presented in the paper.