De Gruyter Handbook of Responsible Project Management

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This handbook provides an authoritative collection of contributions from leading academics in the emerging field of Responsible Project Management (RPM). RPM is defined as the actions of people involved in project management (project managers, sponsors and team members) who seek to deliver societal value (environmental and social) in an ethical manner but who may not have formally delegated organizational accountability as part of their roles. Project managers have begun to embrace the view that they have a responsibility beyond value creation for a narrow group of stakeholders. The debate about the nature and extent of the responsibility of organizational managers, shareholders and stakeholders has been a prominent subject in management research for some time. This debate has broadened to incorporate societal responsibility in the form of community and social responsibility. Responsible management extends this debate by shifting the focus from the organization to the beliefs, behaviours and practices of managers. This trend was accelerated by the financial crisis in 2008 which encouraged institutions to take a closer look at the activities of managers beyond organizational processes and systems and include (multiple forms) of issues pertaining to sustainability and social responsibility. Responsible Management has been defined as the strategies and processes employed by organizations to address obligations to society and stakeholders. In this definition, the explicit addressing of differing types of responsibilities to various stakeholders by managers for citizens embedded in an organizational, community and country context. Responsible management has also been defined as relational management in which stakeholder interests are harmonized and managers determine the appropriate response to emergent scenarios where they have “response-ability”. In the project management domain, however, conceptualizations of responsibility are somewhat limited. Some initial, limited research has identified domains of professional responsibility while researchers have sought to differentiate between responsibility and accountability. This research tends to take an external focus, seeing project managers exercise their responsibilities as part of an external obligation to a client, stakeholder or evaluation agency. To date, little work seeks to explore the values, conceptualizations and practices of project managers as they seek to enact societal responsibility. This handbook summarizes and structures the emerging research field of RPM and makes it available to a broader scientific audience.