Understanding the Organizational Antecedents of Bottom-up un-Enacted Projects - towards a Conceptual Model Based on Deviance Theory

Un-enacted projects are those projects that have not been officially evaluated by the project portfolio management but do exist although they are not known to a company’s project portfolio. As a consequence, resources thought to be available often prove to be actually unavailable and that unofficial initiatives eventually compete for scarce resources. One particular type of these un-enacted projects are bottom-up initiatives. Bottom-up un-enacted projects are unofficial initiatives on which employees spend time without order but with which they intend to benefit their organizations. While previous research highlights the great potential of bottom-up un-enacted projects, they only focus on the individual level but leave the organizational level for further research. To address this research gap, this study aims at gaining a deeper understanding of the organizational drivers of bottom-up un-enacted projects. We draw on deviance theory to develop a conceptual model for explaining the occurrence of these projects. In order to triangulate the emerging model with insights from practice, we use interview data to crosscheck and refine the theory-driven model. Our results advance the theoretical discourse on the concept of un-enacted projects and enable practitioners to understand the levers with which to steer respective activities in the intended direction.