Exploring the Impact of Dynamic Capabilities on the Sustainable Delivery of International Engineering Projects: A Configurational Approach

Scholars and practitioners have attached great importance to the integration of sustainability into project management. However, less relevant research has been conducted in the context of international engineering projects. The highly volatile and competitive international market environment brings great challenges to the sustainable delivery of international engineering projects and therefore always threatens the survival of international contractors. This study aimed to investigate the critical dynamic capabilities that facilitate the sustainable delivery of international engineering projects. Based on content analysis of 45 international engineering project cases, 5 dynamic capabilities were first identified, including project threat sensing, cross-cultural project team integration, stakeholder integration, exploitation-centered reconfiguration, and exploration-centered reconfiguration. Then, a crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis was adopted to explore the configurational effects of the above dynamic capabilities on three dimensions of sustainable delivery, i.e., economic, environmental, and social sustainability. The main findings reveal several configurations of dynamic capabilities for international engineering projects in achieving sustainable delivery of economic, environmental, and social dimensions. This study enriches the research on sustainable project delivery from the perspective of dynamic capability theory and provides insights for global contractors into how to deploy dynamic capabilities in the international contracting market to achieve sustainable delivery of international engineering projects.