The increasing projectification in many areas of our society necessitates the professionalization of project management. However, it remains largely unexplored how this process of professionalization unfolds at the societal level, influenced by institutional factors and key actors with their strategies and activities. It is also unclear why the trajectories vary from country to country. Our research, which uses the concept of institutional logic, investigates the trajectories of project management professionalization in Germany and Kazakhstan, with a focus on the private and public sectors, respectively. The decentralized and normative professionalization of project management in Germany, driven by actors from the bottom up, contrasts with the regulative, top-down approach of the centralized presidential administration in Kazakhstan. The different institutional logics in these countries explain this. Our research provides a distinct perspective for future studies and contributes to shaping the professionalization of project management within existing institutional frameworks and logics.

As global crises such as COVID-19 become more frequent, many projects, which can be called blitz projects, will need to be completed extremely quickly in response. However, there remains a lack of theoretical support for their implementation as well as systematic strategies for managing their schedules. This article examines the responses to COVID-19 by three specialty field hospitals in China. Through reviews and cross-analysis of the influential factors and practices, and their effects on extreme schedule management, this article proposes a systematic strategic framework including the elements of mission, solution and innovation, organization and culture, communication, resources, dynamics, and adaptability.

The extent to which projects are established as an organizational form in society to cope with various challenges has been analyzed extensively in research under the term ‘projectification’. However, it remains unclear how the projectification at the level of society begins and which actors are involved in its institutionalization. Drawing on an explanatory case study in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, responses are provided to these questions and propositions for further research. The country is undertaking reforms as part of its ongoing transformation, which includes the professional implementation of projects, particularly in the public sector. These activities are, to some extent, based on the developments in project management in neighboring Kazakhstan, where a presidential decree also constituted a first step towards the institutionalization of projectification. It later found its way into relevant sectors and to key actors via the presidential administration, primarily through regulative and normative institutions. Because of increased international cooperation, the number and importance of projects in Kyrgyzstan will continue to increase in the coming years, requiring greater emphasis on projectification. The results are informative for research into projectification and for those involved in countries with comparable situations.

Community engagement is essential for creating social value and fostering high-quality development in megaprojects. However, organizing such engagement within public-private partnerships is particularly complex in weak institutional contexts, such as those found in sub-Saharan Africa. Existing research often depoliticizes community engagement, overlooking the critical role of government. Additionally, empirical studies on this phenomenon in sub-Saharan Africa remain scarce. In this study, we adopt a governmentality lens and a design science research method to identify meta-organizing and responsibilization as governmental strategies for organizing community engagement in weak institutional contexts, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa. Through an embedded case study of a megaproject in Nigeria, we develop two sets of design principles that form a transformational community engagement framework. Our findings have implications for community engagement practices in megaprojects within weak institutional contexts and contribute to mainstream external stakeholder engagement research.

Based on the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, this paper overcomes the atomistic view of external stakeholder engagement research to examine the specific conditions under which community engagement in urban infrastructure public-private partnerships (PPPs) can be transformational and create social value with and for communities. In particular, it shows that a transformational approach to community engagement is, in practice, closer to a form of governance that emphasizes involved stakeholders' responsibility. It traces this line of argument through the literature and practice of social enterprises and other hybrid collaborations in the private sector. Conceptually, it contributes to a political and transformational understanding of community engagement within the context of public-private partnerships. First, by proposing a "governmentality analytical framework" for understanding and uncovering the often purposefully concealed dynamic power relations in the engagement process between the state, communities, and private investors. Second, by proposing a set of guiding principles on how to: empower communities to be organized; reconfigure the institutional environment to offer incentives and reliability; and design public-private partnerships as hybrid organizations capable of including other actors, such as non-governmental organizations.

Large-scale projects in Germany are often delivered too late and with excessive costs. This is partly due to lagging projectification in the public sector and also because there is a lack of exemplary entrepreneurship. Therefore, this paper explores the role of exemplary entrepreneurship in the projectification of society in Germany, utilizing the example of Elon Musk and Tesla´s fourth Gigafactory near Berlin. Building on qualitative and quantitative research on the projectification of society in Germany with reference to institutional theory, findings from an explanatory case study are compared, and the insights are discussed. For instance, the reputation of the entrepreneur, Elon Musk, is that of an innovator who can overcome well-established rules in Germany and contribute to a significant acceleration of large-scale projects by making courageous decisions. Upcoming projects in Germany are already using Elon Musk's success story as a role model for their own approach. Although this case study is only one example of a large-scale project managed in an entrepreneurial way and further case studies should explore the interrelationship, it shows that projectification of society in general and the performant realization of projects, in particular, can benefit from it. As a result, promising behaviors and approaches for implementing similar projects can be induced, providing a boost to the projectification of society overall.

Project manager's competences have become recognized as one of key project management actors in successful delivery of projects in today's world.This paper gives a literature overview of existing competence models, with a special accent on competences breakdown, the main components and its relationship, obtained through systematic literature review.Moreover, authors give an application of theoretical knowledge on those competences that matter the most in construction industry, which is traditionally oriented towards technical elements of project management, but exposed to numerous people and context factors.This makes major construction projects great example of demonstrating project manager's personality importance in successful project execution.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the Last-Planner-System’s impact on project cultures in terms of partnering. Design/methodology/approach A case study was performed using multiple data gathering approaches. The project cultures of three projects not applying the Last-Planner-System were compared with three projects that apply the Last-Planner-System. In total, 30 participants were involved in the study. Semi-structured interviews were held and analysed by applying qualitative content analysis. Also, the “organizational culture assessment instrument”, which belongs to the “competing values framework”, was used by means of an online survey. Findings The Last-Planner-System leads to increased levels of mutual understanding and control about the tasks and issues of the other parties. This detailed overview leads towards a more distinguished evaluation of the trustworthiness of individuals. This does not necessarily lead to a partnering project culture. Originality/value The contribution to research is that higher levels of transparency and mutual understanding do not necessarily lead to a high level of trust. Rather, transparency could be seen as a controlling mechanism that leads to better-founded estimations about the trustworthiness of others in the project.

Many researchers believe that leadership is “the most critical ingredient of team success”. The paper presents a shared leadership emergence in product development project teams. We conducted two steps research, by applying reflective practice perspective approach in the semi structured interviews and workshops within the German company which represents a dynamic and changing environment, and practice shared leadership in product development project teams. Results show alignment with previous theory about the topic, but also added new viewpoints trough glasses of practitioners. They believe that complex environment is the main driver for shared leadership, where emergence as an informal process and factors in practice are hard to be influenced. The findings show that interactions between people and team dynamics play a central role in shared leadership emergence and the resulting increase in the complexity of the leadership construct. This paper contributes to shared leadership research by adding a reflective practice dimension and bridging the theory with practice.

Abstract Public–private partnerships (PPPs) have become an effective and efficient contractual agreement between the state and the private sector for providing infrastructure services. Yet, their social acceptance and legitimacy are questionable. Communities accept such changes to their social contract with the government only if the PPPs are perceived to be legitimate as public institutions are not trusted by the communities. As a result, the disappointments and controversial underperformance of PPPs in Nigeria, like most developing countries, have been generally associated with community opposition due to any agency or competence-related failure. Hence, the need for this study. Drawing on data from two urban road PPPs in Nigeria, we identify the following three deeply internalised shared beliefs that shape a community group’s perceptions and attitudes towards an infrastructure built by PPPs in their neighbourhood: the public services should be provided for free, PPPs are created mainly to serve perceived ‘corrupt’ politicians and public institutions are not effective and efficient in service delivery. These beliefs, combined with the community’s structural power, explain why some community groups oppose (or support) infrastructure PPPs within their proximity, and the growing legitimacy challenge PPPs face. Our paper in this regard provides a guidance for designing effective and targeted community engagement strategies for PPP projects and contributed to PPP stakeholder management and mainstream stakeholder management research.

The integration of three-dimensional (3D) printing technology into construction projects potentially yields many benefits, such as reduced site labour requirements, safer manoeuvring of project deadlines and budgets, and more effective waste management. However, the momentum of technology is not as expected owing to the lack of standardised processes and methodologies, and challenges imposed by the new technology. The organisational structure of such projects must be comprehensively studied. Studies on construction projects using the 3D printing technology are lacking. This study reviews the existing studies and three different case studies in Germany, United Kingdom, and United States of America to explore the primary differences between the roles, responsibilities, and interactions of key project participants within the organisational structure of construction projects using the 3D printing technology. The roles and responsibilities of clients/investors, project manager/construction managers, architects, structural engineers, quantity surveyor/project supervisor, and contractors/main contractors have been considered. Therefore, all features of the role of key participants and responsibilities to the new momentum created by this emerging technology must be aligned; otherwise, the combination of new technology and conventional organisation will reduce the value created by the new technology.

Shared leadership is a complex phenomenon as it is a dynamic, interactive, and cyclic process that is shared among several team members at different times. The focus of research on shared leadership is on the preconditions and consequences of shared leadership, but little is known about the process of its emergence. In our study, we take a process perspective to gain deep insights into the emergence of shared leadership. In an exploratory case study, data were collected through observation of team meetings, semi-structured interviews and internal project documents and analysed via a coding process and content analysis. Based on our findings, we develop a process framework for the emergence of shared leadership in a product development project team. We make several contributions. First, we extend the theory of shared leadership by adding a process framework for the emergence of shared leadership in product development project teams. Second, we enhance the leadership emergence theory to include additional antecedents and process mechanisms. Third, we extend the functional leadership theory by identifying the occurrence of leadership functions. The practical contributions we make are relevant for project managers/sub-project leaders and team members to promote and develop shared leadership in product development project teams.

While the projectification of society continues to evolve, it is clearly lagging behind in the public construction sector in Germany. The purpose of the research upon which this article is based was to reveal the role that leadership has on the projectification of the construction sector and to identify the differences between the public and private sectors. Building on the theoretical concept of Institutional Work, semi-structured focus group interviews were conducted on both sides of the construction sector in Germany to ultimately reconcile the findings. The interview's transcripts were analyzed by applying qualitative content analysis. The responses from the private sector show a very high significance of projects for everyday work and a further trend toward projectification in enterprises. This development is attributable to a positive image of executing projects in the private sector and to the leadership provided. In contrast, projects in the public sector still play a rather subordinate role and tend to be perceived culturally and cognitively as being exceptional. As projects are increasingly important for the public sector, leaders can play a key role in nurturing the necessary cultural and cognitive conditions for projectification. The application of Institutional Work concepts opens promising perspectives for future research in the context of projectification.

After many years of research on non-profit organisations (NPOs), the success rate of the projects they manage remains low. This is particularly due to the fact that the awareness of the need for project management competences to achieve project success is poor. This paper aims to close this awareness gap. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between leader-leader exchange (LLX), sharing values, result orientation and personal communication as critical project management competences and their impact on project success in NPOs. The research which is based on social exchange and leadership theories, includes a testing of the research model and hypotheses using the structural equation modelling and bootstrap method. Data were collected during a survey organized in March-May 2023 that targeted more than 100 NPOs in order to apply the quantitative research method. The research findings indicate that the mediating variable “Result-Orientation” has a stronger impact on project success than the positive effect “leadership” and “sharing values” have on project success. However, the significance of leadership and sharing values for project success is increased by personal communication as an important moderating variable. The contribution to the science of this paper lies in the fact that the quantitative method was applied for the first time for the impact study with the chosen project management competences on project success. The practical relevance of the research is to encourage the adoption of social exchange and leadership theories in NPOs, to increase project contribution to civil society.

Risk governance is mostly viewed through the lens of disaster or emergency management departments, agencies, or organizations. Visible in times of crises, risk governance is rarely seen as part of everyday public or private functions such as planning, social welfare, investments, or fiscal responsibilities. This paper emphasizes the importance of disaster risk governance in disaster risk management activities on the example of the post-disaster recovery of Croatia after a series of strong seismic events in mainland Croatia. The analysis is made based on a thorough review of national documents of Croatia and other selected countries overlapped with the national journals reporting on the situation from the affected areas. In accordance with the authors’ opinion, the necessary elements of disaster risk governance are clearly stated through the four Sendai framework priorities, and this statement is supported by the facts from the case study. Without either the political will or the enabling surrounding the disaster, risk management is next to impossible. The Croatian case study emphasizes the importance of disaster risk governance, showcasing the adaptation process for the post-disaster recovery process to start.

PurposeThis paper aims to provide insights into the role of project management associations for the projectification of society from an institutional theory perspective.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on a mixed methods approach. It draws on the research propositions of a recently conducted qualitative study and builds on them by analyzing the empirical data of a quantitative case study.FindingsThe results indicate that the projectification of society in Germany is well advanced and continues growing. The economy plays a leading role, which resonates with other sectors of society. The actions of project management associations have only an indirect influence on the projectification of society, which cultural–cognitive institutions are mediating. Both findings are novel compared to the literature.Practical implicationsTaking an overall view of the findings, project management associations gain a better understanding of the projectification process and important guidance on their role.Social implicationsThe results offer all people interested intriguing insights into the contemporary phenomenon of the projectification of society, along with its current state and future evolution.Originality/valueThe application of institutional theory to the projectification of society in the framework of this case study enables an in-depth analysis of the underlying social processes and interactions between the regulative, normative and cultural–cognitive activities of project management associations on the one hand, and institutions on the other hand, at the societal level. This opens up new and promising perspectives for further research.

The public sector in Germany lags behind the economy in terms of projectification, i.e., the prevalence of projects and experience in applying project management. This has significant implications for realizing complex infrastructure projects in which the public sector is involved as one of the main actors. Nowadays, projectification represents a particular way of thinking about how to embrace a series of dynamic and challenging changes, design them, and implement them effectively for the benefit of society. A quantitative study of projectification in society in Germany was the starting point for our research, the results of which we compared with data from earlier studies of projectification in the economy. Using an interpretative case study drawing on insights from the Berlin Airport, we analyzed the impact of lagging projectification in the public sector in Germany on realizing infrastructure projects to propose suitable approaches. The results of this case study reveal significant effects of lagging projectification in the public sector of Germany on realizing infrastructure projects. In the case of the Berlin BER Airport, an inadequate governance system led to a 9-year delay in the completion date and a 250% overrun of costs directly attributable to the project. This could have been avoided by involving the private construction industry more collaboratively, by building on previous experiences gained, and by a more cooperative way of project planning and implementation. To guide future research, hypotheses are derived that can be used to analyze the underlying problem in greater depth and to derive recommendations for action.