Behavioral barriers to sustainable action in project management and how to overcome them

• 13 barriers to sustainability behavior of project managers are identified. • Rubicon model frames behavioral barriers into volitional and actional barriers. • Volitional barriers include knowledge gaps, role conflicts and security needs. • Actional barriers include goal conflicts & commitment and feedback-related issues. • Strategies to tackle barriers involve guidelines, rewards and leading by example. Project managers encounter behavioral barriers that hinder the integration of sustainability practices into projects. While prior research has explored enabling factors, these barriers project managers face remain understudied. We address this gap through 24 problem-centered interviews, identifying 13 barriers, including low goal commitment, perception-related challenges, feedback-related issues, and role conflicts. The Rubicon phase model provides a structured basis for our conceptual framework for analyzing these barriers, enabling the validation of known general barriers and the discovery of new role-specific ones. Our findings highlight the role-dependent nature of barriers and strategies to overcome them, such as leading by example, establishing guidelines, providing incentives, and capability development. While providing practical value the study also strengthens the theoretical understanding of sustainability-related decision-making and contributes to the sustainability and project management literature by showing that enablers like guidelines, training or rewards are insufficient without simultaneously addressing individual behavioral barriers in perceptions and beliefs.