Interdisciplinary project collaboration is often hindered by knowledge boundaries. Although digital technologies (e.g., building information modeling) should facilitate integration, the literature underestimates the political challenges that disrupt collaboration. This research unpacks these challenges and their resolutions through semistructured interviews and abductive analysis. Findings reveal complex, escalating political challenges, specifically the limited power of certain stakeholders and tensions over digital technology development, along with their corresponding resolutions. Theoretically, this research advances project literature by uncovering neglected power dynamics and shifting boundary spanning from technical knowledge exchange to political negotiation. Practically, it equips managers with actionable strategies to navigate these challenges.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly transforming project management, yet the organizational conditions that enable its effective use in project-based organizations remain insufficiently understood. Drawing on the attention-based view, this study conceptualizes AI orientation as an organizational attentional structure that directs managerial attention toward AI strategy, support structures, and integration priorities. We examine how AI orientation relates to outcomes at both the organizational and individual levels. Using multi-informant survey data from 116 project-based organizations and 358 project managers, complemented by qualitative follow-up interviews, we find that AI orientation is positively associated with business success. This relationship is stronger when organizations are characterized by a positive collective attitude toward AI. At the individual level, perceived AI orientation is positively associated with project managers’ AI use, which in turn is associated with higher perceived AI augmentation in project tasks. Perceived AI orientation also strengthens the relationship between AI use and perceived augmentation. Qualitative insights further show that AI orientation is enacted through strategic prioritization, top-management attention, governance mechanisms, training, and knowledge-sharing practices. The study contributes to research on artificial intelligence in project management by showing that AI-related outcomes depend not only on tool availability but also on strategic orientation, supportive organizational structures, and employee-level uptake.
Although construction projects often encounter conflicts with local communities, particularly landowners, limited research explains how such conflicts lead to value creation. This article examines how project organizations respond to collective opposition from landowners in contentious construction projects in Vietnam. Based on a grounded theory study comprising 25 interviews and four case studies, the findings reveal that organizations can follow a sequential resolution process, beginning with understanding landowner contexts and ending with enforcing legal compliance. This process results in unexpected social value, as conflicts become a mechanism through which unplanned benefits and community value emerge. The study conceptualizes conflict as a dynamic process of value cocreation.
This study investigates how the general public attributes responsibility among organizations involved in project social irresponsibility events and how these attributions trigger moral outrage and protest. Drawing on attribution theory, the study develops a framework with two attribution subjects and manipulates event-related cues for each subject through vignette-based experiments. Results show that responsibility is unequally allocated, shaped by perceived locus of causality, controllability, and stability of two subjects, and in-group bias driven by social identification. Greater responsibility attributed to the project lead organization elicits stronger moral outrage and protest. This study contributes to project social responsibility and social risk management.
This study aims to examine how AI capability enhances the performance of IT projects through parallel mediators, including team member creativity and project innovation. We also test the moderating role of perceived organizational ethical identity for AI in the relationships of AI capability-project team member creativity, and AI capability-project innovation. Data were collected through a two-wave, time-lagged survey from 281 project professionals working in Pakistan’s IT sector. Results suggest that AI capability has a direct and indirect positive influence on IT project performance and is mediated by project team member creativity and project innovation. The results also indicate that when an organization has a high level of ethical identity, the positive interplay between AI capability and perceived organizational ethical identity for AI enhances project team member creativity and project innovation. These findings have several implications for organizations seeking to enhance AI capability to strengthen project team member creativity and project innovation to improve IT project performance.
This study investigates how the digital capabilities of engineering project teams form and evolve in the project context, alongside the key antecedent conditions driving this process. Grounded in dynamic capabilities and sociotechnical systems theories, a mixed-methods approach (process tracing and fsQCA) is employed. The research reveals a sensing-seizing-reconfiguring coevolutionary mechanism and identifies three equifinal configurational paths to high capability: social-dominated, technology-dominated, and sociotechnical-synergistic. By extending these theories into temporary organizations, the findings offer managers granular, context-specific strategies for agile resource orchestration and sociotechnical alignment.
Incompatible stakeholder perspectives often hinder value cocreation in conflict-ridden projects, despite societal expectations for greater inclusion of market and nonmarket voices. Based on expert interviews, we explore how third-party facilitators address deteriorated stakeholder relationships in seemingly intractable conflicts. We develop a typology of four dialogue practices-decoupling, bypassing, buffering, and healing-that respond to stakeholders' readiness to engage, shaped by vulnerability tolerance associated with suspicion or distrust and values- or malevolence-based concerns. Our findings indicate that these practices create inclusive conditions that enable stakeholders to cocreate the relational foundation for constructive interaction, thereby advancing understanding of inclusive project stakeholder engagement.
Hybrid project management combines traditional and agile approaches for managing complex projects. While its benefits and setups are well studied, how organizations adopt and implement hybrid project management remains unclear. Hence, this study addresses this gap through a multiple-case design, finding that hybrid project management adoption is shaped by organizational context, leadership, and iterative adjustments to evolving needs. It proposes a Hybrid Project Management Adoption Model, featuring a novel distinction between conscious adoption (a deliberate, structured transition) and unconscious adoption (an organic, emergent evolution). The study advances hybrid project management research by theorizing adoption as a dual-path process and explaining how practices evolve under organizational conditions.
While generative AI (GenAI) is rapidly transforming project management practice, its socioorganizational implications remain underexplored. This literature review develops an integrative understanding of GenAI adoption across institutional, project, and professional levels of project work. Drawing on sociotechnical systems (STS) theory, the study conceptualizes GenAI projects as multilevel sociotechnical systems and proposes a framework explaining adoption as cross-level alignment rather than isolated enhancement. The findings show that effective implementation depends on alignment among strategic governance, project processes, and individual and team dynamics. The study extends STS theory to GenAI in project contexts and reframes its adoption as an organizational design challenge.
Non-professional project managers (NP-PM)-individuals leading projects based on domain expertise rather than formal project management credentials and certifications-play a growing role in hospitals. Despite their prevalence, their impact on project performance remains underexplored. This study introduces "coping good" as a distinctive intrinsic motivation explaining why NP-PM develop project management competencies. Using self-determination theory as an interpretative framework, the study explores how artifact usage, project performance domains alignment, and power skills development contribute to project performance. Analyzing data from 257 NP-PM with structural equation modeling (SEM), results reveal the importance of tailored training and support to enhance project success in resource-constrained settings.
This study investigates the paradoxical impact of AI-driven digital employees on the new product development project performance. Integrating sociotechnical systems and ambidexterity theory, we tested a moderated mediation model using three-wave, time-lagged survey data from 396 employees engaged in new product development projects. The findings reveal an inverted U-shaped relationship between digital employee adoption and perceived teamwork performance. This nonlinear effect is explained by the differential mediation of ambidextrous innovation. Digital employee adoption promotes exploitation linearly but has a curvilinear effect on exploration. Furthermore, customer participation in value cocreation strengthens the exploitation path while mitigating the potential negative effects on exploration.
Infrastructure projects are often tied to political agendas, leading to community skepticism and opposition. This study explores how changes in the political system influenced engagement between project opposers and project promoters. Using a qualitative research approach and a case study strategy, archival data related to the prematurely terminated Bisri Dam megaproject in Lebanon were collected and analyzed. Results show that deepened division among political parties (configuration of power) and a wider distribution of power among project opposers (formal institutional structure) intensified opposition, leading to project cancellation. This study highlights the importance of considering a broad political perspective in project stakeholder engagement to improve megaproject outcomes from a socially sustainable standpoint.
Megaprojects involve market and nonmarket stakeholders with diverse perceptions regarding whether the project is wanted or not. This study explores how the diversity of stakeholder perceptions of megaprojects affects stakeholder engagement in a forestry megaproject. Through qualitative analysis, wanted and unwanted megaproject frames are identified. These frames create positive, negative, one-sided, and opportunistic firm-stakeholder and interstakeholder relationships, which in turn shape stakeholder engagement types: collaborative, antagonistic, passive, and compromising. The findings expose how the diversity of stakeholder perceptions shapes stakeholder engagement types and reveal darker and more stakeholder-centric approaches to engagement. Thus, understanding diversity improves stakeholder engagement in megaprojects.
Grounded in the job demands-resources model, this study investigated two unique dual pathways: psychological safety and negative emotions in the narcissistic leadership project turnover intention relationship and further investigates the moderating role of job control in the relationship between narcissistic leadership and these psychological pathways. Employing purposive sampling, data were gathered from 308 IT project team members through time-lagged research design. Results: indicate that narcissistic leadership enhances project turnover intention by reducing psychological safety and intensifying negative emotions. Moreover, high levels of job control mitigate the adverse effects of narcissistic leadership. The study provides several contributions to existing project management literature.
This article explores the methodological challenges that face scholars conducting project management research in empirical contexts characterized by apparent institutional voids in which conventional methodological approaches are inadequate. Drawing from our collaborative fieldwork conducted for the Medina Airport public-private partnership in Saudi Arabia, we make three contributions to the project management literature. First, we conceptualize field access in terms of a research strategy entailing processes of bricolaging available resources. Second, we develop strategies to operationalize theoretical concepts in contexts in which there is limited prior research. Third, we propose guidelines for conducting rigorous qualitative research in institutional environments lacking mature and established research cultures. This article provides important methodological and practical insights for project management researchers conducting empirical work in such contexts for generating robust data and knowledge that advance project management research and practice.
Understanding stakeholder complexity remains a critical yet underexplored challenge in project management, particularly in public infrastructure projects where competing agendas and power asymmetries often determine success or failure. This study investigates stakeholder complexity through a comparative analysis of three municipal projects in South Africa. The findings reveal indicators of complexity related to stakeholder roles, agendas, power, and influence networks. These indicators help practitioners recognize when adaptive and intensive engagement strategies are required, bridging the gap between conceptual stakeholder models and their practical application in contested project environments.
Social risks are those potentially undermining social stability or social order. Social risk identification is critical in infrastructure megaprojects because its occurrence would lead to broad societal impacts. Yet managers often misjudge social risks due to cognitive biases and difficulty in processing all available information. This study develops a hybrid retrieval-augmented generation model that identifies social risks from multisource projects and policy documents, and automatically generates causal chains linking risk sources to events, consequences, and responses. Evaluation results indicate that the model produces more complete risk chains than expert reports and outperforms DeepSeek on the same risk identification tasks.
Special purpose vehicles (SPVs) are a form of project organization created for public-private partnership (PPP) projects. SPVs are complex organizational arrangements, relating actors from different institutionally regulative, normative, and cognitive contexts. We abductively analyze interviews with 36 practitioners experienced in managing SPVs using Gioia analysis. We find that SPV design is focused on systems integration, framed by transactional interpretations of contracts. This undercuts the interorganizational integration necessary for SPV design to work more effectively. We find that social and interorganizational integration remain largely overlooked, which is a key reason for PPP infrastructure project failure.
