Factor analyzing project management practices in the United Arab Emirates

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the underlying dimensional structure of project management practices to identify key factors that underpin the successful completion of projects. Design/methodology/approach It employs exploratory factor analyses to investigate the interrelationships of the survey items synthesized from the literature by retaining and reorganizing the important information from the original data while redundant information is removed. Findings The nine theoretical constructs comprising 64 items were coalesced onto five latent constructs comprising 50 items while explaining 50.914 percent of the total variance. The extracted five constructs that describe the best project management practices have been labelled risk management, organizational culture, stakeholder approach, management approach, and project leadership. Practical implications The study results benefit both practitioners and the academic community as five broad categories of best project management practices are identified and their interdependencies are established. Project management professionals can use the latent factors as the critical factors for project success, whereas the research community can use the authors’ results to build higher order structural models and to test hypotheses by linking the latent variables with project performance measures. Originality/value The study contributes to the discourse on project management by identifying critical practices that contribute to the successful completion of projects.