Identifying Project Corporate Behavioral Risks to Support Long-Term Sustainable Cooperative Partnerships

Marco Nunes, António Abreu and Célia Saraiva
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Marco Nunes: Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Beira Interior, 6201-001 Covilhã, Portugal
António Abreu: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon, 1959-007 Lisbon, Portugal
Célia Saraiva: Department of Informatic Engineering, University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro (UTAD), 5000-801 Vila Real, Portugal

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 11, 1-27

Abstract: Projects are considered crucial building blocks whereby organizations execute and implement their short-, mid-, and long-term strategic visions. Projects are thought, developed, and implemented to solve problems, drive change, satisfy unique needs, add value, and exploit opportunities, just to name a few objectives. Although existing project management tools and techniques aim to deliver projects with success, according to the latest reviewed literature, projects still keep failing at an impressive pace. Among the extensive list of factors that may threaten project success, several articles from the research literature place particular importance on a still underexplored factor that may strongly lead to unsuccessful project delivery. This factor—usually known as corporate behavioral risks—usually emerges and evolves as organizations work together to deliver projects across a bounded period of time, and is characterized by the mix of formal and informal dynamic interactions between the different stakeholders that constitute the different organizations. Furthermore, several articles from the research literature also point out the lack of proper models to efficiently manage corporate behavioral risks as one of the major factors that may lead to projects failing. To efficiently identify and measure how such corporate behaviors may contribute to a project’s outcomes (success or failure), a heuristic model is proposed in this work, developed based on four fundamental fields ((1) project management, (2) risk management, (3) corporate behavior, and (4) social network analysis), to quantitatively analyze four critical project social networks ((1) communication, (2) problem-solving, (3) advice, and (4) trust), by applying the theory of social network analysis (SNA). The proposed model in this work is supported with a case study to illustrate its implementation and application across a project lifecycle, and how organizations can benefit from its application.

Keywords: project risks; corporate behavior; social network analysis; project management; risk management; project critical success factors; sustainable cooperative partnerships (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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