Managing stakeholder attributes for risk mitigation: evidence from construction project contractors
International Journal of Managing Projects in Business
ISSN: 1753-8378
Article publication date: 26 August 2021
Issue publication date: 22 October 2021
Abstract
Purpose
Previous studies have proposed that correctly managing stakeholders with certain attributes can benefit project management; however, robust theoretical elaborations and empirical investigations of this topic have been lacking. The purpose of this study is to empirically test the effects of two stakeholder attributes – contractor-perceived contractor salience and contractor project position – on the criticality of five typical contractor-related risks: risk of (1) injuries and accidents, (2) quality defects, (3) work delays, (4) cost overruns and (5) breaches of contract.
Design/methodology/approach
Questionnaire data were collected from 118 Chinese contractor managers. Regression models were run in Mplus 7.11 to test the hypotheses.
Findings
The data show that higher contractor-perceived contractor salience and a more supportive contractor project position were both related to lower criticality of contractor-related risks, including risk of (1) injuries and accidents, (2) quality defects, (3) work delays, (4) cost overruns and (5) breaches of contract. Contractor salience also mediated the negative relationship between a supportive contractor project position and the criticality of contractor-related risks.
Research limitations/implications
The authors’ research design is cross-sectional and thus cannot establish causation in the relationships among the studied variables. The single item measure of contractor project position was used for the first time in the present study; thus, its reliability and validity still await more empirical examinations.
Originality/value
The findings advance the understanding of the value of stakeholder management in projects by specifying that prioritizing stakeholders' claims and securing their support for the project reduce the criticality of stakeholder-related risks. By providing empirical evidence from the construction context, the findings also add to knowledge on the instrumental power of stakeholder management in enhancing project risk management performance.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Humanities and Social Sciences Fund of the Ministry of Education of China (project number 20YJCZH183), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (project numbers 72002030 and 71772136), and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (project number BK20200383). Special thanks go to the participants in our survey and to the anonymous reviewers who provided constructive suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.
Disclosure statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Citation
Xia, N., Guo, J. and Lin, Y.-H. (2021), "Managing stakeholder attributes for risk mitigation: evidence from construction project contractors", International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Vol. 14 No. 7, pp. 1605-1625. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJMPB-11-2020-0345
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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