Exploring Patterns of Sustainability Stimuli of Project Managers

Carl Marnewick, Gilbert Silvius and Ron Schipper
Additional contact information
Carl Marnewick: Department of Applied Information Systems, College of Business and Economics, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg 2006, South Africa
Gilbert Silvius: Department of Applied Information Systems, College of Business and Economics, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg 2006, South Africa
Ron Schipper: P2 Management Consultants, Slotselaan 6–8, 5328 ER Rossum, The Netherlands

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 18, 1-17

Abstract: Sustainable project management is becoming important and the sustainability concepts of people, the planet and profit needs to be incorporated into any type of project. This article focuses on the behavior of the project manager per se and the stimuli patterns that motivate them to adhere to sustainable project management. Three stimuli patterns are used i.e., intrinsically motivated, pragmatic and task driven. To determine which of these patterns influence a project manager, a quantitative pair-wise comparison was used. Twelve statements were used in a pair-wise comparison resulting in a combination of 66 questions. A sample of 101 project managers was analyzed to determine the stimuli patterns. The results indicate that the most prevalent stimulus pattern is the intrinsically motivated pattern with the other two patterns equally important. The results are consistent across gender, age and types of projects as well as industries. It can be concluded that for this study, project managers incorporate sustainability because they feel that it is something they should do. The motivation to consider sustainability is dominated by their behavioral beliefs and the characteristics of the project, or the opinion of others, do not play a large role. This research contributes to the larger body of knowledge with regards to sustainable project management and specifically to the human behavior of project managers. This research addresses the gap that currently exists in current literature where the focus is on the product’s sustainability and sustainable processes.

Keywords: sustainability; stimulus patterns; project manager; behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/18/5016/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/18/5016/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2019:i:18:p:5016-:d:267001

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().