STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT IN SINGAPORE �S CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY: THE STUDY OF AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITIES

Abstract

In the ever rapid changing and demanding construction industry, stakeholder engagement is essential in ensuring the success of a project. Many past researches have demonstrated how the lack of stakeholder engagement in a project led to project failure. Stakeholder analysis and engagement are the main tasks in stakeholder management. Stakeholder management is about the relationships between an organisation and its stakeholders, and these relationships needs to be managed in order to minimise negative impacts and to ensure that the stakeholders do not hinder the achievement of pre-determined goals and objective set by individuals and organisations. Despite being granted autonomous status for 9 years, none or very few studies were done to analyse the stakeholder engagement practices of the 3 universities in Singapore – National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Singapore Management University (SMU). Therefore, the aim of the research is to explore and investigate stakeholder engagement practices adopted in these universities. The objectives are to explore the current stakeholder engagement practices adopted, to examine these practices with reference to the developed evaluation framework based on the identified Critical Success Factors (CSFs), and to identify the different practices and gaps among the universities. The use of qualitative research methodology has been adopted in this study. Semi-structured interview was taken on to comprehend interviewee’s experiences and opinions. Furthermore, desktop study has been conducted to collect data and information from existing works done by previous researchers. Likert scaling was utilised to analyse the results from the interviews. Lastly, a qualitative case study approach was adopted to support the findings from the questionnaire. Finally, through the use of an evaluation framework to analyse the information collected, it is affirmed that stakeholder engagement practices has been significantly adopted in construction projects of the universities. However, project teams should constantly engage in further improvements to enhance the quality of stakeholder engagement in further campus projects.