Abstract
Professions are undergoing a significant change in how they integrate environmental and social objectives into their core values. This article examines the situation in which those working in the project management profession are expected to work under contradictory sustainability constraints. In this article, we investigate the tensions project managers experience when addressing sustainable objectives. Results show that when tensions arise over sustainable objectives (temporality of objectives, organizational barriers, and lack of control), they are addressed only when anchored to an economic one in the form of a business case for sustainability. We also find that when matching traditional project objectives with sustainable ones is not possible, practitioners enact a set of reactions characterized as greenwashing, it can’t be one person, no space for sustainability in my job, other actors involved, or pushing back, depending on the specific project context. Adopting the paradox theory lens, we provide an alternative approach to the business case for sustainability. The practical contribution of this article lies in suggesting the need to find strategies to embrace paradoxical situations and we provide some suggestions to illustrate this.
Highlights
Countless academic studies have coupled the concepts of sustainability and project management (Aarseth et al, 2017; Huemann & Silvius, 2017; Marcelino-Sádaba et al, 2015; Sabini et al, 2017; Silvius & Schipper, 2014), so much so that these concepts have become recognized as a new school of thought within the project management stream (Silvius, 2017) often referred to as sustainable project management (SPM; Sabini et al, 2019; Silvius & Schipper, 2014)
Tensions The set of tensions that emerged from our data sample are associated with (1) the diverse temporal dimension of sustainable objectives; (2) the presence of organizational barriers; and (3) the lack of control over the process, including a lack of knowledge on best practices and a lack of institutional support
How can objectives in a long-time horizon be met while implementing a short-term oriented project? Long-term oriented concepts collide with the traditional short-term ones in project management: “The project managers are the exact wrong people to care about the long term; the exact, incorrect person, because they’re focused on getting things done”
Summary
Countless academic studies have coupled the concepts of sustainability and project management (Aarseth et al, 2017; Huemann & Silvius, 2017; Marcelino-Sádaba et al, 2015; Sabini et al, 2017; Silvius & Schipper, 2014), so much so that these concepts have become recognized as a new school of thought within the project management stream (Silvius, 2017) often referred to as sustainable project management (SPM; Sabini et al, 2019; Silvius & Schipper, 2014). The professional world is experiencing a transformation of traditional project management (Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, International Project Management Association [IPMA], 2015; Project Management Institute [PMI], 2010, 2016), where professional boundaries and duties have widened to include social and environmental aspects in the development of the project (Huemann & Silvius, 2017; Sabini, 2016; Sabini et al, 2017) Whether those sustainable objectives are developed in accordance with Elkington’s original triple bottom line (social, environmental, and economic; see Elkington, 1997) or using the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs;sustainabledevelopment.un.org), these transformations in project management create a complicated balance of different conflicting objectives. Any decision made regarding a Project Management Journal 52(4)
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