Building megaproject resilience with stakeholders: The roles of citizenship behavior and critical transition mechanisms

We explore the role of stakeholders’ citizenship behaviors in building megaproject resilience to unexpected events. Our case study is of a mega construction project in Europe. We analyze rich data from semi-structured interviews to build a grounded theory. We find internal and external stakeholders engaging in project citizenship behaviors as a response to unexpected events that threaten achievement of the iron triangle. Further, our findings suggest that the effects of megaproject citizenship behaviors on megaproject resilience can be increased through critical transition mechanisms. We distinguish between three such critical transition mechanisms: (a) aggregating individual citizenship behaviors to the group level (power in numbers); (b) bringing issues to the right individual (boosting); and (c) shifting the mindset of a dominant percentage of a stakeholder group (mindset shift). Our research contributes towards a better understanding of the important role played by project stakeholders as a resource in building megaproject resilience and the processes that render their citizenship behaviors consequential for megaproject resilience.