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Abstract
Institutions achieve organizational objectives through the legitimization of projects, project organizational culture, and its project actors. These objectives can either mitigate against risk and/or create advantage or opportunities for the organization. This paper reveals how relationships between project actors such as project team members, project managers and project sponsors, influence project performance outcomes. Stakeholder engagement and social capital between project actors are crucial contributors to project performance outcomes as well as completing projects on time, on budget, and within scope. Research also indicates that organizations continue to fail to achieve project outcomes when not taking into consideration the importance of these contributors. As such, the interest of this dissertation was to explore how stakeholder engagement and social capital influences project performance outcomes.
A survey instrument was provided to individuals involved in projects within the Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) community. The survey attempted to measure perceived levels of the subjects’ engagement when social capital and stakeholder engagement were employed by the project manager and project sponsor. The findings indicated that social capital employed by the project manager contributes to project team member engagement. However, and more importantly, the results revealed how project team engagement positively influenced project performance outcomes.
The results from this paper offers interesting suggestions to extant academic and research literature. It exposed the understanding of how project team members perceived use of social capital by project managers’ contributes to project performance outcomes. Both organizational and project leadership can consume the findings from the body of this research to further improve project performance outcomes. The meaningful employment of social capital between project managers and project team members can result in profound and positive relationships while achieving organizational objectives.