Human resource management is understood and widely accepted as an important function when managing projects. Over the years, project management as a profession has developed and consolidated a robust theory base that lead to a body of knowledge that is unique to its practice and distinct within the larger management discipline. In this direction, this is an opportune moment to reflect on the themes explored within the project management literature that is specific to managing people. The current paper presents a bibliometric analysis of literature on this topic. We use 104 peer-reviewed articles appearing in Web of Science database as the theoretical corpus for analysis. Using the key words- “human resource management” and “project management”, we conduct a co-occurrence analysis of the documents. Co-occurrence analysis reveals the key words that occur together in the documents. For the purpose of our analysis, we set the minimum number of times the key words should occur together to 3. Based on this, we extracted 39 words that are grouped into 7 clusters. These 7 clusters reveal the themes on the study of human resource management variables within the project management literature. Following the discussion of the themes, we propose directions for future research on the topic of managing people in projects.
PMI Talent Triangle: Leadership
