Upward Influence to Overcome Hierarchical Authority Expectations: A New Approach for Stakeholder Management

Abstract

Abstract: Critical to project success is effective stakeholder management. This paper presents a challenge for the project manager who uses traditional approaches to manage mid-level stakeholders in an organization. Dual roles of a mid-level stakeholder (as a stakeholder of a project and as an agent of the corporate) may cause problems that would result in difficulties for project managers in identifying the stakeholder’s attributes and overcoming hiera rchical authority expectation. However, the dual roles of the stakeholder result in its weakness in the project-stakeholder relationship. Can a project leverage its strategic role for effective upward influence by linking project objectives to corporate strategic objectives? To address this research question, case study method was used to gain a deeper understanding of mid- level stakeholder’s salience. This research proposes an upward influence strategy to embed a project-stakeholder relationship in a hierarchical stakeholder network. Keywords: upward influence strategy, mid-level stakeholder, stakeholder network, corporate strategy