Adversarial factors in multi-stakeholders’ engagement of global-IT projects
International Journal of Managing Projects in Business
ISSN: 1753-8378
Article publication date: 12 May 2020
Issue publication date: 15 February 2021
Abstract
Purpose
Adverse situations negatively impact project stakeholders’ engagement. Past research has sporadically investigated adverse situations affecting stakeholder engagement but lacks a thorough empirical investigation. The paper aims to discuss this issue.
Design/methodology/approach
A web survey was designed to address the knowledge gap of the identification of the impactful adverse situations during multi-stakeholder engagement. The research yielded 144 completed responses from multi-stakeholders engaged in globally distributed ICT projects.
Findings
Exploratory factor analysis revealed eight factors that underpin 26 adverse situations. The top factors, ranked in terms of importance according to their Relative Importance Index (RII) are: dysfunctional conflicts, dearth of reasoning, glitches in project governance, clash of personalities.
Research limitations/implications
This research reveals the factors that can impact engagement in the form of meaningful clusters and dimensions and opens-up a future research agenda toward causation and mitigation studies related to adversarial stakeholder engagement. The study focuses on globally distributed ICT projects and has not explored generalizability in other sectors.
Practical implications
This research enables project managers and stakeholder analysts to get an understanding on the importance of different dimensions of adverse situations in the way stakeholders think, act and emote.
Social implications
Awareness on the potential adversarial stakeholder engagement helps in effectively managing the sustained stakeholder relationships and mental well-being of project stakeholders.
Originality/value
This research contributes to project management practice, as it reveals the underlying factors of adverse situations occurring during multi-stakeholders’ engagement, provides clarity on their components and ranks them in terms of importance for their overall effect on stakeholders’ engagement.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to express our gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for both their time and the valuable comments provided that helped significantly the improvement of this paper. This paper presents outcomes of research included in the PhD Thesis of Krishnan Mysore conducted at the University of South Australia.
Citation
Mysore, K., Kirytopoulos, K., Ahn, S. and Ma, T. (2021), "Adversarial factors in multi-stakeholders’ engagement of global-IT projects", International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Vol. 14 No. 2, pp. 445-471. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJMPB-01-2019-0014
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited