An investigation on cooperative behaviors in the Chinese construction industry

Abstract

The construction industry is full of kinds of claims, disputes, adversarial confrontation and bad performance. Therefore, cooperative behaviors among the contracting parties on the project are very critical to the success of the project, but to some extent it is hard to attain certain level of cooperation. The reality of the construction industry is that, the projects are normally implemented by the temporary project organizations formed by the contracting parties having different interests, which would lead to complicated project environment during the whole project life. Meanwhile, the prevalent evaluation criteria of project success just put emphases on the final project outcomes, especially project schedule and project cost. This reality truly leads to the situation of self-consideration of their own interests, not the success of the whole project, which is detrimental to the development of cooperative behaviors among the contracting parties. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the current state of the construction industry on the Mainland China, and further propose a framework which can resolve the current problems and promote the cooperative behaviors.

This study wishes to develop the principles for the branch of knowledge of construction management, which mainly focuses on the issues of contracting and project management. In this study, three theories (Resource-Based View, Transaction Cost Economics and Relational Contract) are adopted to form a combined theoretical foundation for analyzing the current problems and proposing a theoretical framework for cooperation in the construction industry.

This study investigates the level of cooperative behaviors among the contracting parties through analyzing the behaviors of the individual members among different functional groups on the project. Cooperation is considered as the behaviors which can facilitate the achievement of the project objectives, and can be categorized into four sub-dimensions for detailed examination. The complicated project characteristics and the constant adaptation among the contracting parties bring about the requirement of analyzing the process-based issues of cooperative behaviors. Through the adoption of the questionnaire survey and the semi-structured interview, the antecedents of and the alternative tactics for cooperative behaviors are investigated. As a result, based on the research findings, a theoretical model for cooperative behaviors has been proposed.

Both the research findings confirm the first priority of self-expressive motives (attitude and value) for the development of cooperative behaviors. Compared with self-expressive motives, the influence of the incentives/sanctions mechanism is not strong. In addition, the collectivism-individualism construct also demonstrate more on cooperative behaviors than the incentives/sanctions mechanism. Meanwhile, the status construct (within-group status and group status) shows significant relationships with the attitude and value of the individual group members. The sub-dimensions of interactional justice and procedural justice significantly influence the individuals’ status evaluation and the assessment of the results and the fairness of the incentives/sanctions mechanism.