Stakeholder Management: Proposal for Research—Do Successful Project Managers Employ ‘Interest-Based Negotiation’ to Create Successful Project Outcomes?

Increasingly the management of stakeholders is reported, by research on the management of projects, as being critical to the successful development of projects. Current research into the management of stakeholders charts a move from: classifying who stakeholders might be, to one of determining whether and how to manage them, to one of recommending ‘engagement’. Stakeholders are seemingly important players in the project’s environment because they are able to both significantly influence the project’s delivery and because they may well be the arbiters of whether the project can be considered successful or not. This latter point indicates the role that stakeholders and those stakeholders that are beneficiaries of the project can have in determining how ‘value’ is interpreted. This research proposal identifies a gap in existing literature; that gap is in the final process of stakeholder management. Aligned to a risk management process, stakeholder management ends with the idea that the stakeholder will be managed. As writers show that ‘engagement’ might be beneficial, then ‘interest-based negotiation’ (IBN) allows for a project manager to engage with these groups through IBN. Anecdotal evidence shows that elements of IBN might be unconscious components of successful project managers’ interactions with stakeholders. This paper proposes a study design that will allow for the hypothesis H1 ‘Successful stakeholder engagement can be correlated with project managers employing elements of interest-based negotiation’ to be tested.