Understanding stakeholder complexity remains a critical yet underexplored challenge in project management, particularly in public infrastructure projects where competing agendas and power asymmetries often determine success or failure. This study investigates stakeholder complexity through a comparative analysis of three municipal projects in South Africa. The findings reveal indicators of complexity related to stakeholder roles, agendas, power, and influence networks. These indicators help practitioners recognize when adaptive and intensive engagement strategies are required, bridging the gap between conceptual stakeholder models and their practical application in contested project environments.

Trust issues and collaboration inefficiencies are ongoing challenges in the construction industry, leading to great monetary and resource loss. Blockchain technology has a unique potential to foster trust through attributes of immutability, transparency, and decentralization, but the precise impact of blockchain on trust dynamics among project stakeholders has not yet been thoroughly explored. Blockchain-based interorganizational trust was developed as a conceptual model. This model provides a framework with seven propositions to explore blockchain’s influence on interorganizational trust. The findings indicate blockchain’s potential to strengthen system-based trust, which in turn enhances both affect-based and cognition-based trust.

The persistent underrepresentation of women at work questions the value and use of a gender strategy and gender equality and diversity initiatives (GEDI). This study explores equality and equity perceptions of men and women working in male-dominated project-based organizations about their organization’s values, behaviors, treatment of employees, and GEDI use. Drawing on an interpretivist paradigm, in-depth interviews from five project-based organizations were conducted. Findings indicate gendered organizations are not implementing a full range of GEDI, due to their gendered culture and structure. This study identifies important contributions required of leaders in the design and implementation choices for effective GEDI.

Naturally occurring conversations, especially those occurring where there is controversy—a not uncommon project experience—provide excellent data. This article commences with a discussion of a controversy over whether an excavation into clay was normal. This leads into a discussion of contracts, which broadens to include their role as indexical items and objects of autopoiesis. The article concludes with some practical advice on how to research projects through controversies that arise from interpretation of their documentation.

Confronted with unexpected events, project resilience is significant for megaproject delivery success. A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis is used to explore the practical configuration conditions for project resilience in 81 megaprojects. The findings verify the complementary effect of social capital and dynamic capabilities on project resilience and reveal that the antecedent configuration conditions for proactive and reactive resilience differ. Our study broadens the literature on antecedents of project resilience and expands their complex relationship based on resource-based and dynamic-capability views. Moreover, it provides practical strategies to improve megaprojects’ proactive and reactive resilience.

This study investigates Tolerance of Ambiguity in project managers, focusing on how their ability to navigate ambiguous situations varies over time and influences their performance. In a four-week study of 275 project managers, we tracked changes in Tolerance of Ambiguity in project managers and found that these temporary fluctuations were significantly associated with positive mood, adaptive performance, and project progress. Factors such as self-control, coping skills, creativity, and supportive leadership emerged as key drivers of these changes. This study highlights Tolerance of Ambiguity as a dynamic, context-dependent competency in project managers, offering novel insights for enhancing project managers’ ability to navigate ambiguous situations.

We explore how project financing processes should be adapted to accommodate changes to organizational structures, operational processes, and cultural values in scaled agile transformations. We studied the transformation project of a large German automotive manufacturer to identify the issues that emanate from the incompatibility of incumbent project financing and the mitigation strategy that allowed the company to evolve rather than revolutionize the way they manage project finances. Our findings enrich the empirical knowledge on scaled agile transformations and draw attention to the much-overlooked aspect of financing large-scale change initiatives in incumbent firms.