Multiple stakeholders’ critical success factors scale for success on large construction projects

This study proposes a multiple stakeholders’ measurement scale that allows for the assessment of critical success factors (CSFs) for success on large construction projects. Large infrastructure projects’ successful implementation has been a contentious topic in emerging economies. Project success depends on multiple stakeholders’ perspectives, and present theories are not transforming into practice. Relatively less work has been done to examine CSFs from multiple stakeholders’ perspectives and for developing countries. This study adopts underpinnings from CSFs and project success theories to investigate CSFs for project success from three key stakeholders’ perspectives (clients, contractors, and consultants). This study followed a systematic scale development procedure to develop and validate the scale. It included an extensive literature review, item pool generation and its evaluation for content and face validity, pilot testing, and administration of a questionnaire to a population sample. The CSF scale consisting of a representative pool of 37 scale items under five CSF constructs was administered to a sample of 300 participants through a questionnaire survey based on purposive sampling. The scale’s psychometric properties in terms of dimensionality, reliability, and validity were examined through factor analyses. It resulted in a final scale consisting of 10 scale items under 3 constructs. This study identifies project stakeholder management, project characteristics, and project environment having significantly influencing project success on large construction projects. Human factors and procurement factors are found to be non-significant. This scale project stakeholders to understand the relative importance of CSFs towards developing a common understanding of project success and improving project performance. Further, this study contributes to the current body of knowledge being among the few studies developing a multiple stakeholders measurement scale for assessment of CSFs for large construction projects in emerging economies. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.