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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Awareness on the potential adversarial stakeholder engagement helps in effectively managing the sustained stakeholder relationships and mental well-being of project stakeholders.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the practice of stakeholder engagement as a social network dynamics for stakeholder satisfaction and project success in the lifecycle of mega transport infrastructure projects (MTIPs).

Hypotheses indicating the positive relationships between stakeholders’ effective attributes, stakeholder engagement as social network dynamics and project success through stakeholders’ satisfaction have been developed. Based on a questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews, responses have been gathered from the representative groups and organizations on their social network dynamics for their satisfaction and project success. A hypothesized structural equation model has been tested using AMOS statistical software package.

The analysis highlighted the engagement of the stakeholders within the strategic intents of the project with the public needs and expectations. The model depicts the processes of building social network models based on the capturing of the project’s data in relation to the stakeholders’ communication and satisfaction across the key issues for success in the lifecycle of MTIP.

The model is applicable on most MTIP with a diverse stakeholder base and the underlying complexity associated with the community participation and consultation processes. The model will also support wider stakeholder engagement in the planning of MTIP with optimal operationalization and service delivery from a community perspective.

The research involves an approach for rationalizing the stakeholder engagement policies of the MTIPs by providing an empirically grounded model simultaneously linking various aspects of stakeholder effective attributes, stakeholder engagement and their relationships to stakeholder satisfaction and project success in MTIPs.

This chapter presents a case study of a community engagement project that was established in 2013, between the International Business School of Hanze University of Applied Sciences (UAS), Groningen, the Netherlands, and various communities within Mombasa County, Kenya. From an educational point of view, this engagement helped enrich the curriculum, in terms of learning how business is conducted in a different cultural setting, and how classroom knowledge can be applied within the field. From a community perspective, this engagement acted as a facilitator to knowledge and resource access. The authors highlight aspects that have explicitly added value to the projects, whilst simultaneously presenting engaging dissonance arising from the implementation of the project as well as discussing factors that could be addressed to improve this type of community engagement. The recommendations would be most applicable to projects within similar cultural settings and/or with a similar geographical distance.

This study aims to determine the effect of humble leadership on project success (PS). According to the authors, such an effect is mediated by team engagement and moderated by organizational culture. The direct and indirect effects of team engagement provided helpful insights. Moreover, organizational culture did not moderate the relationship. The authors’ objective is to contribute to the literature on project management (PM) and leadership of how team engagement plays a significant role in PS.

Data were collected from 317 employees working in Pakistan’s telecom sector projects. Five project-related telecom companies were the target population of this study, and the reason behind choosing the telecom sector for investigation is their valuable contribution to the revenue and technology introduction in the country. A time-lagged approach was selected for data collection to avoid the common method bias, which served the purpose. SPSS v23 and AMOS v23 were used for constructing structural equation modeling and path analysis to examine direct and indirect effects.

The results revealed that humble leadership is positively related to PS. Furthermore, team engagement mediated the relationship between humble leadership and PS, while there was no interaction effect.

The impact of team engagement was the primary topic of interest with humble leadership in this study. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study has investigated team engagement in the project context. The authors tried to contribute to the PM literature.

Transport megaprojects often struggle to offer social value (SV) that meets local communities' needs. This problem is embedded in how local communities' views are captured and incorporated into SV plans through local community engagement (LCE). By problematising the literature, this article aims to identify LCE issues and their impacts on SV plans at the front-end of transport megaprojects.

The theoretical lens of the study is the practice theory developed by Schatzki (2016, 2005). The authors conceptualised LCE as a practice and conducted 32 semi-structured interviews with UK practitioners. The authors collected data in three steps from three types of practitioners involved in LCE practice and SV planning: project managers, LCE experts and SV experts.

The authors identified 18 LCE issues with thematic analysis and clustered them into five themes. These issues impact LCE with five mechanisms. Findings show that a weak link between LCE and SV plans due to the issues reduces LCE to a tick-box exercise and presents a distorted view of local communities. This reduces SV plans to the bare minimum for project approval instead of offering relevant SV to local communities. Addressing the issues goes beyond changing the approach of project teams to engagement (from instrumental to normative) and requires changing the practices.

For the first time, the study uses practice theory to conceptualise LCE as a practice, following the notion of project as practice. The study problematises the literature to address the under-represented link between LCE and SV plans.

The aim of this research was to understand how governmental stakeholder engagement facilitates the sustainability of industrial engineering (IE) projects. A model for governmental stakeholder engagement activities is presented.

The authors relied on a single-case study of a mining project in Northern Europe, where a novel collaboration and engagement approach with governmental stakeholders was piloted in the project's front-end phase. The analysis focused on the collaborative practices through which the IE project investor engaged governmental stakeholders during the project's front-end phase and how the engagement contributed to solving challenges in the early planning and permitting process and achieving project plans that balanced economic, social and environmental aspects.

The findings show how four collaborative engagement practices reduced uncertainty and equivocality related to the legal sustainability requirements, enabled the development of sustainable design solutions and overall accelerated the permitting process without compromising the quality of final project plans.

The findings can be used to plan governmental stakeholder engagement and understand related challenges that need to be overcome. The study highlights the need to develop established practices and guidelines for governmental stakeholder engagement.

This study complements prior research on stakeholder engagement and project sustainability by developing an understanding of how governmental stakeholder engagement can be a key mechanism enabling the sustainability of IE project's end product. This research contributes to stakeholder theory by elaborating on a new stakeholder role, intermediary stakeholder.

Stakeholder engagement in construction projects is an ingredient that contributes to project optimal performance. Many developing countries have a paucity of literature about stakeholders' engagement in construction projects. Therefore, the study investigated South Africa's shareholders' engagement in construction projects and recommended possible measures to mitigate potential limitations.

The researchers collated data from South African experts in stakeholder engagement via a phenomenology type of qualitative research design. They explored the “perceived hindrances” facing stakeholders' engagement in construction projects and proffer measures to mitigate them. The study analysed collected data via thematic analysis and achieved saturation. Three themes emerged from the analysed data.

Findings show that efficient stakeholder engagement will enhance team collaboration and integrated construction project delivery. Results identified the perceived limitations facing stakeholders' engagement in South Africa's construction projects and categorised them into individual perceived hindrances, organisational perceived hindrances and government-related perceived hindrances. Also, findings proffer measures to mitigate perceived hindrances via policies and programmes within the sector.

Besides enhancing policymakers and other stakeholders in South Africa's construction industry to understand the benefits of stakeholder engagement better, the study may stir up the construction sector's stakeholders to embrace enhanced and effective stakeholders' management.

This study contributes to construction project practice that involves stakeholders, as it reveals the underlying causes of perceived hindrances facing stakeholders' engagement in construction projects. Also, it proffers feasible solutions to mitigate these hindrances and enhance stakeholders' engagement within South Africa's construction projects.

The more contemporary views on managing projects recommend stakeholder engagement as an important part of the process. Challenges have been reported when attempting to involve project stakeholders in a construction project due to the complexity of the processes. In projects such as refurbishment projects, the efforts to incorporate end users' needs and preferences into spatial environmental functions increase the complexity of stakeholder engagement during the journey of the project. This paper presents a unique technique used to integrate different tools within the system enquiry methodology in modelling the project stakeholder engagement process for refurbishment projects.

Aiming to address the problem, system dynamics (SD) has been selected as the most suitable method for modelling the dynamic behaviour of this complex system over time. A tool known as a rich picture diagram (RPD) is proposed as the precursor of the development of a causal loop diagram (CLD) to facilitate a more holistic abstraction for applicable solutions. An example of a single case study involving the refurbishment of a higher education building project is presented to explain the analysis undertaken in the process of developing the CLD that models the dynamic behaviour within end-user stakeholder engagement.

This paper demonstrates the complementarity capabilities of the soft and hard systems of enquiry in modelling stakeholder's dynamics within the refurbishment construction contexts. The RPD soft system tool was found useful to congregate diverse stakeholder expressions and experiences of a complex system in a holistic manner. Subsequently, the development of the CLD was fully guided by the information and relationship captured and presented in the RPD to yield a representative system model. Furthermore, this paper also reports the dynamics of the actors, situations, events and their inter-relationship found in the presented refurbishment project.

This paper enriches the techniques within the system enquiry methodology by integrating hard and soft system tools for dynamic process modelling purposes. This is particularly achieved by utilizing the RPD as the precursor of SD that provides a useful way for researchers and stakeholders to fully understand the dynamics and develop robust systemic interventions to optimize end-user stakeholder engagement during the journey of refurbishment projects, particularly of higher education buildings.

Given the demanding and stressful nature of project work, with a view to explore established concepts of burnout within the project management context, the purpose of this paper is to examine two instruments: the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) and the Areas of Worklife Survey (AWS). Since there is a paucity of literature in project management anchored within the MBI and the Areas of Worklife Survey (AWS), this paper proposes a high-level model on burnout in project management, drawing on the literature underlying these two instruments.

Using a conceptual approach, the paper reviews the social psychology literature on burnout and then the narrow stream of literature on burnout in project management. The paper develops and proposes a conceptual model as a foundation to explore the links between the determinants of project manager burnout/engagement and turnover/retention.

This paper contributes to an improved understanding of the determinants of project manager burnout, engagement, turnover, and retention.

The driver for this research is to contribute to the emerging literature on burnout in project management and strategies to help improve engagement and retention of project managers in the discipline – specifically, their tenure in organizations and/or the profession.

This paper contributes to the topic of burnout in the project management context. An improved understanding of the stressors in project management contexts, and the mechanisms to mitigate the stress, can add to our understanding of project manager well-being, engagement and retention, improved project success, and healthier work environments.

The 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has significantly disrupted the traditional ways for organizations to function, mandating their prompt adaptation and reaction to issues related to employees, operations, and communication. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to report on a total quality management (TQM) implementation as a sample motivational case to support the need for a new work from anywhere (WFA) stakeholder framework that can be used by other companies as they build, maintain, and continuously improve a WFA culture and environment for successful Quality 4.0 and COVID-19 initiatives.

Quality 4.0 that specifies an adaptive quality environment can help organizations quickly identify and respond to problems during the COVID-19 pandemic. Analyzing a Lean Six Sigma implementation through the lens of Quality 4.0 in a case study, the authors propose a new stakeholder engagement framework for companies to build, maintain, and continuously improve the culture and environment for facilitating social interactions.

The authors’ proposed framework consists of three major phases: (1) identify and plan stakeholder management, (2) manage stakeholder engagement, and (3) sustain stakeholder engagement. The first phase entails organizations supporting a culture of trust, engaging, and empowering stakeholders, identifying stakeholders, planning for stakeholder management, and inquiring about problems in the process. The second phase requires engaging stakeholders via participatory buy-in. The third phase focuses on monitoring stakeholder relationships, including modifying strategies and plans.

This study bears some valuable implications for practitioners. First, the stakeholder management process should be established upon a culture that promotes trust, engagement, and empowerment. Second, the authors identify tools that can assist in the execution of WFA activities. Third, the organizational team needs to actively manage the WFA stakeholders and then sustain the stakeholder relationships. Finally, the implementation of the framework herein can be supported and strengthened by tools and techniques that promote participation and buy-in from stakeholders to ensure the project team hears, trusts, and values their contributions.

This study contributes to the existing literature and provides practical guidance for managers to effectively manage the workforce and engage stakeholders.