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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the differences of the influence of implication of perceptions of business environment on Thai contractors' strategic behaviors and strategic performances.

Using a case study methodology, the paper extensively documents nine case studies interviewing the CEOs or senior executives, functional managers, senior project managers, and some of their clients regarding research questions developed from strategy theories with evidence that has appeared in various strategy researches in construction.

A generic theoretical framework of contractor's strategic alignment has been developed to address different strategic alignments illustrating an interaction between implication of perceptions of business environment, strategic behaviors, and strategic performances.

This generic framework can systematically help Thai contractors in improving strategic behaviors and yield better strategic performance. The findings can also be applied to contractors in other developing countries.

This paper is a strategic management study in construction that holistically emphasizes the customer and the firm as the key instead of solely emphasizing the project. The study in this area is slowly gaining recognition in the construction industry.

In recent years, companies have started to open up their Research and Development (R&D) and their innovation activities to external partners. They aim to access new resources and capabilities and to gain shorter time-to-markets. However, as several studies have shown, it can be difficult to manage collaborative (open) innovation projects to achieve desired outcomes. Starting from this premise, the paper investigates how project stakeholder management is different in open innovation projects from traditional R&D projects.

The study has a qualitative nature and is based on the interpretative paradigm with an inductive orientation. The paper leverages interviews with experts involved in open innovation projects conducted in two Science and Technology Parks between Sweden and Italy.

The analysis shows how companies manage multiple stakeholders in open innovation projects and the peculiarities project stakeholder management faces in these projects when compared with traditional R&D projects. The paper shows how the relationships with external partners in open innovation projects are regulated by informal identification and analysis frameworks, which reduce the tensions deriving from these multiple collaborations. In addition, it underlines a set of good practices, and project management aspects for developing effective absorptive capacity of know-how, resources, and capabilities from external stakeholders in open innovation projects.

The paper analyzes for the first time how companies manage multiple stakeholders in open innovation projects in a different way from traditional R&D projects. Furthermore, the paper introduces a shift in the focus of the analysis: it focuses on the level of the project conducted through multiple collaborations instead of on the level of the firms involved in the project. Finally, the paper integrates open innovation research with project management research.

Research investigating the role of factors affecting open innovation remains scarce. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of managerial ties in facilitating the two types of open innovation – in-bound and out-bound.

Data are collected using the questionnaire survey method from 339 middle and top managers working in four high-tech industries in Malaysia.

Results show that in most high-tech industries in Malaysia, managerial ties with universities and with government officials facilitate in-bound open innovation, while ties with managers at other firms do not significantly relate to it in any high-tech industry. Further, managerial ties are not found to relate significantly to out-bound open innovation in any high-tech industry except in the aerospace and electronics industries wherein ties with government officials relate negatively and positively to out-bound innovation, respectively.

This study provides empirical evidence about the managerial ties practitioners should and should not forge to succeed in the open innovation paradigm.

This study is probably the only study so far that gauges the impact of managerial ties on open innovation. The results of this study fill a major gap in the current open innovation theory besides providing insights for practitioners.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss in depth the factors that lead to misalignment between the project management (PM) and the business strategy by investigating four case studies in the telecommunications industry in Saudi Arabia.

Due to the limited research on the subject of the alignment of PM and business strategy, the methodology used in this research was a case study in depth interview.

The paper highlights the important factors that affect the process of aligning the PM to the business strategy. The companies that have strong alignment between the business strategy and the PM show successful projects outcome while the companies that have mismatch alignment show less successful projects outcome.

The paper has investigated four telecommunications companies only. However, more companies will be better to compare the finding. Due to time constrains, the research has studied one project in each company. Each project was supporting one of the company's business strategies. More projects and business strategies will lead to clear picture of the alignment. Access to executives’ managers and CIO's was difficult. Several meetings were cancelled without short notice.

This paper helps the companies to implement their business strategies with embedding their projects in the overall strategy. Also, helps the PM team to execute the projects in a strategic way.

This paper contributes to the literature with a clear explanation of the concept of the alignment and provides a framework to ensure the alignment between the large PM process and the business strategy is achieved.

A comprehensive understanding about open innovation implementation is still lacking. In particular, a compilation of drivers and barriers for OI implementation is absent from the literature. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to identify critical success factors (CSFs) for OI implementation at the firm level.

A systematic literature review was conducted in order to identify CSFs for OI implementation in previously published literature. A total of 2,894 papers were identified, 156 of which were subjected to full independent analysis by the three authors. The following aspects were considered: research strategy, approach (empirical or theoretical) and objectives; theoretical background; methodological procedures; main results; and contributions to the literature. If the paper reported empirical research that included a description of actual OI implementation, additional aspects were analyzed: industry or sector of application; firm characteristics; success of OI implementation and OI tools and techniques reported.

A synthetizing framework with six thematic categories of CSFs was proposed: leadership, internal innovation capability, network and relationships, strategy, technology management, and culture. A total of 22 CSFs for OI implementation were identified within these categories.

The proposed framework is an attempt to systematically generate a comprehensive list of factors that impact OI implementation. As such, it can support the theoretical development of OI-related capabilities, and serve as basis for future research that investigates operationalization and measurement of such capabilities.

Research has demonstrated that employees desire to be shown appreciation in various ways. The five languages of appreciation provide a model for exploring these differences. This study aims to explore whether individuals who speak different languages (and are from various cultures) differ in how they prefer to be shown appreciation.

The Motivating By Appreciation Inventory (MBAI) is an online tool that assesses each person’s preferences in how they desire to be shown appreciation at work. Initially developed in English, the MBAI has been translated into seven additional languages. Over 2,200 employees took the MBAI in their preferred spoken language: Mandarin (Chinese), Danish, French (Canadian), Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish (Latin American), Thai and Turkish. The frequency of each group’s preferred appreciation languages was analyzed to determine similarities and differences across the languages spoken.

Given the non-normal distribution of the data, the Kruskal–Wallis test found that there was a significant difference in preferences for participants’ primary appreciation language across the seven groups of various spoken languages. One key theme was that words of affirmation were most frequently chosen by five of the seven language groups, whereas employees from Thailand and Turkey chose acts of service most frequently. Additionally, tangible gifts were the least frequently chosen appreciation language by all groups, and at rates below their US counterparts. In three of the languages, quality time was preferred significantly less compared with the other languages.

Some of the groups’ findings (Portuguese, Thai) may be impacted by a confounding variable of the type of work setting (manufacturing) in which the employees worked – in comparison to office-based work settings.

One theme was, in comparison to other ways of receiving appreciation, tangible gifts are not highly valued by most employees across all language groups. Therefore, organizations using gifts as the primary way to communicate appreciation to employees may be wasting a lot of money. Similar to English-speaking employees, five of the seven language groups chose words as their preferred appreciation language. A wide range exists, however, across language groups with regards to the proportion who desire words, quality time or acts of service. Multicultural organizations should pay attention to employee preferences, lest they waste time and energy on undesired actions.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study that has examined the preferences of how employees like to be shown appreciation across seven different language groups.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to describe and explain how organisations use internal projects to implement organisation-level strategy objectives.

Theory development with an emphasis on explaining key constructs and their mutual relationships. The theoretical contribution is represented in a diagram along with a detailed verbal account.

The paper develops a dynamic, cross-level framework to illustrate the organisational processes and outcomes that determine project-based strategy implementation within a single organisation. The interplay between the base organisation and the project, and benefits realisation were singled out as key future research areas. The proposed framework engages with central discourses in the fields of project management, strategic management, innovation studies, knowledge management and organisation studies.

Only the contours of an organisation-level theory of strategically motivated internal projects are outlined. Future research must elaborate on the complexities, the non-linear relationships and the boundary conditions that follow from the proposed framework.

Managers are alerted to the strategic role of internal projects, how these projects help connect strategy and performance and what the accompanying organisational processes and outcomes look like.

The paper constitutes an early conceptual treatment of strategy-driven internal projects as a distinct project category, thus addressing a major knowledge gap in project studies. Organisational project-management theory is extended with suggestions for future research.

Previous literature on project strategy has adopted the narrow view that a project is to be conducted under the governance of a single strong sponsor or parent organization. The purpose of this study is to provide a critical analysis on prior project management (PM) literature addressing different context‐specific strategies of single projects.

Literature analysis.

There are two important determinants in the project's context that affect the strategy of a single project: a project's autonomy in its environment and the complexity of project's stakeholder environment. Based on these two determinants, we characterize four types of alternative positions that projects can have in their context: parent's subordinate and autonomous projects that occur in a stakeholder environment that is not complex, and projects with weak and autonomous positions in a complex stakeholder environment. The developed project strategy framework is applied in the context of innovation projects. The analysis results include strategy contents for different types of innovation projects in terms of the project's direction and success.

This study contributes to PM research by broadening the focus from mere tactical‐level projects towards projects as strategic entities, and by suggesting the management of projects differently in different contexts. Further, theoretical and empirical research is proposed on both testing the suggested framework and elaborating it for different project types.

The paper opens up avenues towards the development of new and context‐specific PM bodies of knowledge.