Search results

Project management scholars and practitioners have long debated how best to harness social interactions to optimise knowledge exchange and enhance stakeholder alignment and value. This study aims to assist project managers to understand and manage fuzziness and create enduring front-end value. It views the project life cycle as a potential source of co-created value. The paper uses a social capital lens to provide a deeper understanding of the project front-end; it uses a three-dimensional view (structural, relational, cognitive) to explore how stakeholder social capital can overcome front-end fuzziness to enhance decision-making and, thus, value creation.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with senior managers from teleconnections companies, which, when combined with secondary data, established the impact, nature and dimensions of social capital within a project management setting.

The research found that social capital can help to reduce complexity, uncertainty and equivocality in the early stages of projects, making them more clearly defined and thus helping to create greater stakeholder value in the later stages of the project. A surprising finding was that some project team members engaged in intentional equivocality to try to promote their own benefits rather than those of the organisation.

This paper reconceptualises the impact of social capital on stakeholder value creation in the front-end of projects. The paper contributes to a more holistic view of the front-end of project management, focusing social capital to reduce the sources of front-end fuzziness.

Using the upper echelons theory, this study aims to investigate the moderating effect of managerial discretion (MD) on the impact of dynamic managerial capabilities (DMCs) on established firms’ (EFs) response strategies to disruptive innovation (RStDI).

A cross-sectional study was conducted using an online questionnaire to collect data from senior management of sample firms, targeting the population of professional service firms (PSFs) operating in the Emirate of Dubai. After receiving 491 responses, data was analyzed using IBM packages (SPSS and Amos) through a covariance-based structural equation modeling technique.

As proposed, the underpinnings of DMCs (managerial human capital, managerial social capital and managerial cognitive perceptions) were associated with EFs’ strategies for responding to DIs. Surprisingly, despite theoretical predictions, MD did not moderate the relationship. These findings provided support to the main propositions of the upper echelons theory, however, not for its contextual moderator (MD).

The cross-sectional approach to testing the research model limits the identified significant effects that should be further investigated. The research sample was restricted to PSFs operating in Dubai, UAE, thus limiting the generalizability of the findings to the examined context.

The findings of this investigation are valuable to managers and hiring teams. They provide empirically supported insights on the critical role of managerial dynamic capabilities underpinnings (human capital, social capital and cognitive perceptions) in facilitating organizational RStDI. The findings also provide significant insights to policymakers, notably on the importance of innovative and well-crafted policies and regulative frameworks that enhance MD.

This study provides one of the first empirical quantitative analysis to assess MD and test its effects as a moderator, thus contributing significantly to the existing theoretical arguments on MD. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first to quantify the relationship between DMCs and organizational RStDI.