Project Trump

Abstract

In 2016, Donald J. Trump won the presidential election of the United States of America. This paper aims at analysing the persuasion techniques used by Donald Trump in his speeches and what project managers can learn from that with regards to influencing project teams. Robert Cialdini’s rules of persuasion were used to create a research framework to analyse five of Mr. Trump’s speeches. These rules are based on social psychology. To get a good overview of Mr. Trump’s speeches, we chose five key speeches made during the presidential race to analyse. The conclusions are that it is valuable for project managers to understand how the rules of persuasion function along with the potential effects they can have on project teams. They can be used as catalysts for motivation, unity, trust, cooperation and vision in project teams. It is also valuable to study the ethical side of persuasion to avoid being manipulative or being manipulated. This paper ends on a summary of what can be learned from Mr. Trump’s persuasion techniques on influencing project teams and notes on persuasion and ethics.