Conflict Management Climate in Contractor’s Project Team: Conceptualizing its Relationship with Interface Management and Project Performance

Abstract

Functional heterogeneity symbolizing different “thought worlds” in an organization has a potential to cause intra-organizational conflicts. On construction projects, the general contractor’s project organization is an entity that is tasked with transforming drawings into reality and conflicts at its functional interfaces (execution-safety interface, execution-planning interface, execution-quality interface and execution-commercial interface) could jeopardize a project’s successful completion. Effective interface management therefore seems to be contingent on the successful management of conflicts. This research is built on the long-term perspective of conflict management, which argues for proactive conflict management by introducing structural changes in a system. Climate is a notion which deals with shared perceptions of individuals with regard to distinct phenomena and hence combining the notions of long-term perspective with that of climate will allow researchers to measure shared perceptions of individuals with regard to structural variables theorized to foster collaborative conflict management. The notion of CMC therefore provides opportunity to see how the shared perceptions of individuals with regard to collaborative conflict management influence the notions conceptually linked with CMC. Hence, three notions i.e. CMC, interface management and project performance and the link between them are conceptualized in this paper. Finally the paper concludes by developing three propositions about the nature of relationship between the constructs.