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Abstract

Large infrastructure and manufacturing projects involve a large number of stakeholders. These stakeholders can be internal to the project boundary or external. Unlike the internal stakeholders whose primary objective is project success leading to growth of business, external stakeholders may have exceedingly diverse interests, often making a large section of them project resistant. With a large count of such stakeholders around the project, it pose a major challenge to execute the project successfully. Hence, their needs have to be analysed based on the outcome of which, they have to be engaged to turn them to neutral or supportive to the project. When it is a question of couple of thousands of stakeholders, understanding their behavioral pattern individually is indeed a challenge and quite often, not feasible.

The present article, therefore, endeavors to map the behavior of a population of such stakeholders with their predominant needs categorized under Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, power and influence they can exercise and group the stakeholders in six categories.

Once done, engagement strategy for each group can be worked out based on the group characteristics and they can be engaged, suitably linked to their basic needs.

Introduction

Managing stakeholders had always been a challenge while implementing a projects, particularly, if the project happens to be a green field endeavour. New terrain, new environment, culture and belief, socio-economic conditions, language spoken, demography etc. makes it very difficult for the project proponent to understand what kind of stakeholder management strategy will work. The challenge multiplies if the size of the project is large and it is a complex project like large construction, infrastructure and projects which are part of major Government programmes.

For the internal stakeholders, there is a clear objective and business rationale for successfully completing the project, which eventually benefit the organization with some share of benefit passing on to the internal stakeholders, directly or indirectly. Additionally, these stakeholders are in the ambit of a governance framework. These two factors play a significant role in keeping the internal stakeholders engaged and positive to the project.

Contrary to the above scenario, some of the stakeholders external to the project implementing organisation including project affected persons (PAPs), have exceedingly diverse interests, usually with no alignment to the project objectives, rather, a little or prejudiced knowledge of the project and its outcome. Some of these interests arise out of their genuine basic needs, while others are ostensible needs arising out of other considerations. Incorrect assessment of these expectations, more often than not, make a large section of them resistant to the project. Irrefutably, in such circumstances it becomes a major challenge to the project proponent to execute the project smoothly and successfully with such a large number of stakeholders opposed to the project. The answer to this tricky and delicate problem is to engage these stakeholders suitably with an aim to turn their attitudes from resistant to supportive or at least neutral.

Key question here is, who should be engaged in what manner considering the diversity of their interests. To answer this question, it is essential to understand their basic needs and expectations which are causing them to behave in a particular manner against the interest of the project. Since the population for a large complex project runs in thousands, understanding their behavioral pattern individually is not realistic.

To make such an analysis more realistic, the approach this article suggests is that all the stakeholders be grouped on the basis of their fundamental needs mapped to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Since the hierarchy already defines the kind of needs a particular level is associated with, the particular groups need will be known immediately without having to analyse their behavior individually.

As per Maslow (1943), the deficiency, or basic needs are said to motivate people when they are unmet. Also, the need to fulfil such needs will become stronger the longer the duration they are denied. For example, the longer a person goes without food the more hungry they will become and shall be more motivated to react. One must satisfy lower level basic needs before progressing on to meet higher level growth needs. As a ready reference, the graphical representation in  Fig: 1 below:

Fig 1: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs