Stakeholder assessment in construction projects using a CRITIC-TOPSIS approach

Purpose Stakeholder assessment is based on attributes possessed by stakeholders, making the process heavily reliant on evaluating attribute weights. The present assessment methods are based on Analytical Hierarchy Process, Analytical Network Process, and pairwise comparisons that heavily rely on decision-makers’ skills and knowledge. An objective evaluation of attribute weight needs to be done to overcome this challenge. Design/methodology/approach A Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) based approach, through the combined use of Criteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation (CRITIC) and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) methods has been incorporated to objectively evaluate the weights of the stakeholder attributes and their ranking with a specific focus on construction megaprojects. Five stakeholder attributes and twelve commonly associated stakeholders with megaprojects were considered to achieve this. Findings The new model presented power, durability and legitimacy as three important stakeholder attributes, further used to determine stakeholder importance. The client, contractor and project manager were identified as the top three internal stakeholders, and customers, local community and utility service providers as three crucial external stakeholders. Research limitations/implications The findings from the proposed method provide the practitioners with updated information about the attributes they need to look into when planning stakeholder involvement and management. Further, it also leads them to the established framework for the provided stakeholder ranking when planning their management strategies. Originality/value The use of CRITIC method allowed to address the possibility of any correlation between the attributes in their weight determination. This was one of the advantages as co-relation between the attributes during their weight determination has not been addressed in previous methods.