Abstract
Sustainable project management is becoming important and the sustainability concepts
of people, the planet and profit needs to be incorporated into any type of project. This article
focuses on the behavior of the project manager per se and the stimuli patterns that motivate them
to adhere to sustainable project management. Three stimuli patterns are used i.e., intrinsically
motivated, pragmatic and task driven. To determine which of these patterns influence a project
manager, a quantitative pair-wise comparison was used. Twelve statements were used in a pair-wise
comparison resulting in a combination of 66 questions. A sample of 101 project managers was
analyzed to determine the stimuli patterns. The results indicate that the most prevalent stimulus
pattern is the intrinsically motivated pattern with the other two patterns equally important. The results
are consistent across gender, age and types of projects as well as industries. It can be concluded that
for this study, project managers incorporate sustainability because they feel that it is something they
should do. The motivation to consider sustainability is dominated by their behavioral beliefs and
the characteristics of the project, or the opinion of others, do not play a large role. This research
contributes to the larger body of knowledge with regards to sustainable project management and
specifically to the human behavior of project managers. This research addresses the gap that currently
exists in current literature where the focus is on the product’s sustainability and sustainable processes.