Effective Antidotes to Address Adverse Situations During Multi-Stakeholder Engagement: The Case of International ICT Projects

Adversarial multi-stakeholder engagement in international ICT projects can bring up adverse or negative situations that can be detrimental to project performance, project outcomes and project actors well-being. Prior studies do indicate the antidotes as remedial strategies or proven practices to address adversarial multi-stakeholder engagement but lack empirical research on investigating the effectiveness of the antidotes in addressing the difficulties in stakeholder engagement. This knowledge gap is addressed using a questionnaire survey involving 144 global ICT professionals. 20 antidotes were ranked using the Relative Importance Index (RII). The top highly effective antidotes are trust building, transformational leadership, single point of contact, stakeholder analysis and interaction planning. The research findings contribute to project stakeholder management practice in providing the general awareness and enablement of the project management community in proactively or reactively deploying the antidotes to avoid or alleviate difficulties during multi-stakeholder engagement.