Dottorato in INGEGNERIA INDUSTRIALE E GESTIONALE

Titolo della tesi: The missing link between Stakeholder Engagement and Sustainability within Project Management: evidence from practice

The present study aims to rethink and reconceptualize the notion of stakeholder engagement in field of knowledge of project management (PM). The systematic analysis of PM literature shows the need of a theoretical convergence of the knowledge produced so far on this topic, as well as the need of understanding the role of sustainability, and its inclusion and declination, in stakeholder engagement area of expertise. The analysis of the literature and the collection of relevant factors in stakeholder engagement theory is included and described in a theoretical framework and condensed in a Sustainable Stakeholder Engagement scheme. The proposed framework has two dimensions that incorporate project manager’s attitudes (the “how”) and objectives (the “why”) in stakeholder engagement, positioning them inside a scheme that defines how different practices result in different levels of sustainability in the specific project management process. The first dimension (attitudes) ranges from reactive relation processes (low level of sustainability) to proactive relation processes (high level of sustainability) while the second dimension (objectives) ranges from management of stakeholder (low level of sustainability) to management for stakeholder (high level of sustainability). Thanks to this structure, it was possible to classify the Sustainable Stakeholder Engagement scheme in eight different areas. Each of them represents a different stakeholder engagement approach, based on the combination of the two dimensions’ values. An online survey based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process methodology, and built on the theoretical framework, was developed in order to evaluate the sustainability degree of the current project managers’ practices on real projects. The respondents, that were active professional project managers, prioritized the attitudes and the objectives stakeholder engagement giving back the level of sustainability expressed as a result of the combination of the two dimensions’ values. The findings of the survey showed that there are differences among the analyzed project management sectors: construction, IT, telecommunications and others. This led to the development of a ranking: project managers of construction projects expressed their preference for an approach that is fully sustainable, showing high values on both attitudes and objectives; project managers of IT projects expressed their preference for an hybrid approach between the fully sustainable and the ethical one, with high values on attitudes and lower values on objectives than the construction one; project managers of telecommunications projects expressed their preference for a fully ethical approach, with lower values on attitudes and objectives compared to the previous sectors. The research produced both theoretical and managerial implications. The theoretical implications include the creation of a theoretical framework to represent sustainability presence in stakeholder engagement process through a Sustainable Stakeholder Engagement scheme based on previous works present in the relevant literature about the topic. Moreover, the results of the survey offered interesting ideas for first assumptions and hypothesis, fueling future research with propositions to be verified and tested. The originality of the present research lies in the novelty of the topic addressed. Sustainability in project management theory and practice (stakeholder engagement included) is still to be fully discovered, as sustainability has just entered the scene in the field of project management and it is acquiring a growing interest both from academic and professional contexts. Therefore, there is still much to do in order to define and outline the various fundamental project management pillars that will be part of so-called “sustainable project management” and this research represents one of the first effort to systematize and analyze in depth at least one of those pillars.