Trust in projects: An empirical assessment of owner/contractor relationships

Impact of project governance on project success, with mediating role of organizational support and project team cohesion

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to determine how project governance influences project success. According to the authors, such an effect is mediated by organizational support and project team cohesion. The direct and indirect effects of organizational support and project team cohesion provided helpful information. The authors’ objective is to contribute to the project management knowledge of how project team cohesion plays a significant role in project success.

Design/methodology/approach

Data were collected from 350 employees working in Pakistan’s oil and gas industry. Four prime oil and gas exploration companies were selected as samples based on their contribution to the revenue. SPSS v23 and AMOS v23 were used for constructing structural equation modeling and path analysis to examine the direct and indirect effects.

Findings

The results revealed that project governance is positively related to project success. Furthermore, organizational support and project team cohesion mediated the relationship between project governance and project success.

Originality/value

Team cohesion has been primarily a topic of interest in sports psychology literature, education and medical sciences. There is an expressed need to investigate team cohesion issues in the broad domain of organizational development, specifically the project management literature. This study contributed by discussing team cohesion in the project context. Second, project governance was investigated using the conservation of resources theory. The lens of intellectual capital was applied to examine intangible resources of project governance like rules, regulations and directives for project success.

Linking “multi-dimensions” of relational governance and opportunism in a collectivist culture

Transaction costs between actors in projects funded by multilateral institutions are high. And according to the theory of transaction costs, this could be explained by the omnipresence of opportunism. At the same time, these projects, like non-international projects, are exposed to high risk and socio-political complexity, including cultural complexity: local lifestyles, institutions, politics, laws and regulations, customs, practices, norms, languages, time zones, holidays, processes, contracts, conflicts and resources. It may then be difficult to exclude that the reduction of these costs may depend in particular on trust and relational norms in a collectivist culture. This research therefore aims to explore the influence of relational norms and trust on opportunism and to examine collectivist culture as antecedent to these dimensions of relational governance. The study is based on primary data collected by questionnaire from 76 international development project coordinators in Burkina Faso (West Africa). The structural equation method based on the partial least squares approach was used to test our hypotheses. Our results show that of the two dimensions of relational governance, trust is the one that has a negative and significant influence on opportunism. Furthermore, it appears that collectivist culture has a negative indirect effect on opportunism through trust. Our results make an interesting contribution by showing that using the aggregated form of relational governance rather than specific dimensions provides an imperfect and over-simplified picture of reality.

Sifting Interactional Trust Through Institutions to Manage Trust in Project Teams: An Organizational Change Project

Trust in project teams has been found to lead to positive project outcomes. However, the role of project managers in facilitating development of trust in projects is not well-understood. This article addresses this by exploring mechanisms to facilitate the development of interactional and institutional trust and explicating the interplay between those mechanisms. Drawing on longitudinal data from an organizational change project, findings suggest that to facilitate trust development, project managers must concurrently exercise four practices: preaching, involving, sympathizing, and adhering. Simultaneous and tailored application of the first three practices affects interactional trust; the latter not only fosters institutional trust but is also a necessary filter for the dynamics of interactional trust.

Collaborative Behavior in Relational Contracting Projects in Hong Kong—A Contractor’s Perspective

The construction industry in Hong Kong has adopted relational contracting (RC) as a way forward to address frequent conflicts in construction projects and to promote sustainable development. Despite this effort, adversarial behavior of project team members is still prevalent, stemming from conflicting agendas, which hinders the successful implementation of RC. There is a need to improve collaborative attitudes and behavior among project team members in RC projects, but there is still a lack of understanding of factors that can promote this inter-organizational collaboration. Therefore, using the theory of planned behavior, this research investigates factors that form relational attitudes, collaborative intentions, and collaborative behavior, and their relationships in RC projects in Hong Kong. Quantitative data were collected from experienced practitioners in RC projects and were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM). The results reveal that senior management commitment and relational norms are needed to nurture relational attitudes, which in turn influence the development of collaborative intentions. These intentions can eventually promote collaborative behavior, which is expressed by teamwork, affective trust, and extra-role behavior (striving beyond roles to maintain collaboration). The findings advance knowledge and contribute to practice by providing a structured process to nurture collaboration in RC projects for sustainable development.

Bibliometrics and visualisation of research on trust in construction projects

The present study used scientific mapping analysis to describe the overall state of the literature on trust in construction projects (TC) and to gain a deeper understanding of its intellectual structure and research areas of interest. It focuses on 349 articles from 27 journals in the construction-management domain from the past 20 years. The influential journals, scholars and articles in the domain of TC were analysed. A qualitative follow-up discussion targets two main objectives: intellectual structure and research fronts. The TC intellectual structure involves topics such as relationships, project performance, contracts and behaviour, approached by way of multiple disciplinary fields, including ‘transaction, management and accounting’, which are supported primarily by organisational theory, organisational trust theory, trust theory and incomplete contract theory. Multi-case analysis and structural equation models are used widely as research tools. New key TC research areas include varying relationship characteristics, trust evolution, interpersonal trust and new problems in project governance.

Success Factors in Sustainable Management of IT Service Projects: Exploratory Factor Analysis

Management of successful IT projects in a sustainable manner is influenced by numerous factors. Organizational awareness of the necessity of engaging all project stakeholders is an important issue that helps in meeting project sustainable development goals. While there are many studies on the success factors of IT software projects, there is still little coherent research on the success factors of IT service projects. The purpose of this article is to contribute in filling this gap by attempting to identify success factors of the IT services project involving both traditional and agile approaches and considering sustainable development, specifically in terms of the stakeholders’ role in project management. We conducted questionnaire-based research involving 155 IT service project managers. The results of the study were subjected to exploratory factor analysis. As a result, we presented and thoroughly formally examined the factorial model of success components in the IT service industry. We distinguished four factors: (1) agile techniques and change management, (2) organization and people, (3) stakeholders and risk analysis, and (4) work environment. The results were compared with analogous studies found in the literature. The research showed that both traditional and agile management approaches coexist, meet sustainable development goals, and are significant for the successful management in IT service projects where all stakeholders play an important role.

The project steering committee, project governance and trust: insights from a practical case study

Purpose

Trust in how projects are managed is important because leaders have the power to make decisions that impact project outcomes. Steering committees provide strategic direction and governance for projects and they support the project manager. The purpose of this paper is to study how steering committees contribute to governance and trust. More specifically, the aim is to explore, which steering committee features and governance mechanisms are important for building trust.

Design/methodology/approach

Empirical data were collected using in-depth interviews. The studied case concerns the Norwegian Navy’s experience with a steering committee in the project of building new frigates.

Findings

Findings show that the steering committee had a significant impact on governance and trust in the project. The identified governance mechanisms performed by the steering committee included: control and performance measurement, support, decision-making, relationship management, reporting, resource management, risk management and strategic focus.

Research limitations/implications

Despite the limitations of studying only a single case, the findings may provide general learning, as well as important practical information and experience to managers interested in the role of the project steering committee.

Practical implications

The paper provides key managerial implications that project owners should take into account when organizing a steering committee. The analysis identifies composition, competence, authority, responsibility, commitment and continuity as steering committee features that contribute to building trust. Findings particularly highlight the choice to include external steering committee members to be successful.

Originality/value

This research extends the current understanding of how through different features and governance mechanisms a steering committee can build trust in the management of projects.

Impacts of Risk Allocation on Contractors’ Opportunistic Behavior: The Moderating Effect of Trust and Control

In construction projects, contractors often exhibit opportunistic behaviors, which harms the project performance, and risk allocation between clients and contractors affects the contractors’ opportunistic behaviors (strong and weak). In this study, a structural equation model was built to explore the impacts of risk allocation on opportunistic behavior and the moderating role of trust and control through an empirical test using a recovery questionnaire with 342 interviewees. The results show that the greater the risk contractors take, the stronger their opportunistic behavior is. Trust has a significant inhibitory effect on both strong and weak opportunistic behaviors caused by risk allocation, while control has a significant inhibitory effect only on strong opportunistic behavior caused by risk allocation. This study enriches the research on the governance mechanism and construction management of opportunistic behaviors and provides management suggestions for risk allocation and control measures of such behaviors.

Work-to-Family Conflict, Job Burnout, and Project Success among Construction Professionals: The Moderating Role of Affective Commitment

This study explored the effects of work-to-family conflict on job burnout and project success in the construction industry. First, a theoretical model with affective commitment as a moderating variable was developed according to the conservation of resources theory. A structured questionnaire survey was then performed with Chinese construction professionals, with 309 valid responses received. In the valid data, the proportion of male construction professionals is 73% and that of female construction professionals is 27%. The analysis of the valid data used structural equation modeling. The results indicate that: (i) work-to-family conflict has a positive and significant effect on job burnout, and a negative and significant effect on project success; (ii) job burnout negatively affects project success; (iii) affective commitment negatively moderates the relationship between work-to-family conflict and job burnout. This study extends the existing body of knowledge on work-to-family conflict and helps us to better understand the functional and moderating roles of affective commitment in the context of construction projects. Furthermore, this study provides theoretical guidance and a decision-making reference to help construction enterprises manage the work-to-family conflict and job burnout of construction professionals and advance their levels of affective commitment.

Theorizing IT Project Success

This study theorizes IT project success by integrating the project level drivers to the IT, business, and environment level enablers. An attempt is made to delve into underlying structures below the project level in order to understand the systemic reasons behind a particular success or failure. In this journey we rely on the general systems theory and the key concepts like elements, state, properties, process, hierarchy, and environment. It is shown that IT projects can be straightly abstracted by the general system principles. Within the systemic framework, potential factors behind the success of the IT projects are identified, the relationships between the factors are hypothesized and then the hypotheses are integrated into a hierarchical research model. Finally, the hypotheses and the research model are empirically evaluated. According to the results it was confirmed that all levels considered in the research model have significant impacts on the success of an IT project. Similarly, a significant improvement in IT project management in terms of project success can be obtained by improving the quality of involved factors. A favorable financial situation, highly-perceived importance of IT, sound business – IT alignment, and good IT and IT project competencies have remarkably significant positive impacts on the success of IT projects.

Interplay of relational governance, task conflict, opportunism and their effect on the performance of projects

Practitioners and academics have been perplexed over the years by low efficiency and bad performance in construction projects. Several critical factors have been uncovered by previous studies which are governance mechanism, task conflict and opportunism. But an obvious question arises how the mechanism of governance in the presence of conflict can mitigate opportunism. The overarching objective of this study is therefore to create a model to study the effectiveness of these mechanisms of governance in the presence of task conflict. This paper is based on a positivist study philosophy in which a quantitative deductive method was used to collect data from 139 participants. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) through SmartPLS3.The research findings show that relational governance affects project efficiency considerably and is helpful in decreasing opportunism and conflict. In addition, there is proof that opportunistic behavior will increase the task conflict among parties but both task conflict and opportunism doesn’t have direct impact on the performance of project

The effect of the client–contractor relationship on project performance

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is first to examine the effect of client-led and contractor-led supply chain initiatives on project performance in the Indian construction industry and second to assess how the client-led supply chain initiatives complement the contractor-led supply chain initiatives.

Design/methodology/approach

In this study, the effects of the client-led supply chain initiatives (reward power and competence trust of the construction clients) and the contractor-led supply chain initiatives (contractor integration and calculative commitment of the contractor) on project performance in construction projects are examined. The data were collected from 346 construction professionals working in Indian construction projects using purposive sampling. The proposed hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling.

Findings

The contractor-led supply chain initiatives, in the form of contractor integration and the calculative relationship commitment of a contractor, were found to be strong mediators, indirectly affecting the project performance. On the other hand, the client-led supply chain initiatives, in the form of the reward power of the client and the competence trust of the client, directly influence the project performance.

Research limitations/implications

This study reports the inevitable bias on the part of participants, who responded to the survey either in the capacity of client or contractor, although they might have executed projects in both capacities. Future studies could benefit from the use of objective data instead of behavioral data.

Practical implications

This study helps construction firms understand how to demarcate the client and contractor roles in the construction supply chain to improve the project performance.

Originality/value

The originality of this study lies in its investigation of the influence of client-led supply chain initiatives and contractor-led supply chain initiatives on project performance.

Job Burnout, Work-Family Conflict and Project Performance for Construction Professionals: The Moderating Role of Organizational Support

Construction professionals are prone to work-family conflict and job burnout, which in turn can affect project performance during implementation of delivery. To cope with this, a questionnaire survey was undertaken with construction professionals in the Chinese construction industry and 373 valid responses were received. A theoretical model introducing organizational support as a moderating variable was developed and tested with structural equation modeling. The results showed that there is a positive correlation between work-family conflict and job burnout for construction professionals. Involving organizational support can alleviate the impact of work-family conflict on professionals' job burnout. Meanwhile, both work-family conflict and job burnout have negative effects on project performance. Therefore, an atmosphere and culture of humanized management should be established within the construction enterprises. Additionally, organizational incentives such as regulations and rules should be formulated assisting employees achieve work-family balance. Such incentives could contribute to the construction industry and improve project performance. Furthermore, this study provides a new theoretical perspective for the management of job burnout and work-family conflict in the construction industry, complementing the existing body of knowledge.

Reconciling the Views of Project Success

This article presents a new model encompassing all the important critical attributes needed to measure project success across different stakeholder groups. The study investigates the possibility that project failure is a result of the interpretations of the criteria and factors used for success by multiple stakeholder groups. Unique projects must have their outcome parameters monitored and controlled to minimize the chances of failure and the likely major financial and managerial ramifications for the organization. Early testing of the model supports its use to increase the shared, multiple stakeholder perception of project success, leading to more informed decision making and motivation of employees.

Trust in collaborative construction procurement strategies

The aim of this study is to explore the extent to which trust is a viable tool in collaboratively procuring more successful UK further education construction strategies. A mixed-methods approach of quantitative and qualitative methodologies is adopted with the former using 79 survey questionnaires and subjecting data to correlation analysis. The research population is restricted to those contracting, consulting and client organisations that have had experience with collaboratively procured projects. Quantitative study findings have determined that there is a Pearson’s product moment correlation coefficient of 0·87 between all trust-building mechanisms and trust generated. Based on a p value of ≤0·05, it suggests a very strong influence between the two variables. Cronbach’s alpha test results revealed good reliability based on a coefficient of 0·79. Qualitative study findings inform the discussion of why organisations feel that certain trust-building mechanisms are particularly successful. These include incentive provisions, workshops, collaboration management systems, senior management commitment, open and joint communications and accounting policies. The study gives an understanding of how trust-building mechanisms can be designed and implemented for improving project outcomes. Future qualitative research is recommended to explore trust-building initiatives in developing a framework for increasing trust in partnering strategies.

Governance and Ethics in Temporary Organizations: The Mediating Role of Corporate Governance

The impact of multilevel level governance on the frequency of ethical issues in temporary organizations (TOs) is investigated. A structural equation model, based on a global survey, showed that behavior control, as a governance mechanism at the temporary organization (TO) level, reduces the frequency of ethical issues. This relationship is partly mediated through corporate governance, which controls ethical issues by following good governance principles. Using institutional and agency theory, we identify a substitution effect, where micro level (TO) governance substitutes for ‘holes’ in the macro level (corporate) governance. Situational contingencies for the synchronization of governance efforts across macro and micro levels are discussed.

Exploring factors affecting owners' trust of contractors in construction projects: a case of China

BACKGROUND

It has been found that a low level of trust among members of a construction project team leads to poor performance in China. Many researchers have described the challenges, consequently advocating partnering as an attractive approach for more valuable cooperation. Because substantial investments have been poured into construction projects since the year 2000, trust research will improve the performance of construction projects and will be meaningful to the Chinese construction industry.

PURPOSE

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the attributes affecting owners' trust of contractors, to understand the potential properties of these factors, and to rank the factors in order of importance.

RESULTS

Twenty-four attributes are identified from a literature review. Supported by qualitative reviews, a questionnaire is conducted to obtain relevant data, and 168 valid responses are obtained for data analysis. Principal component analysis (PCA) is employed to find the factor structure of the identified trust attributes. By the method of PCA, the attributes are extracted into eight factors, including interaction history, information sharing and communication, contract and institution, relation-specific investment, reputation, integrity, competence, and opportunistic behaviour.

CONCLUSIONS

The value and originality of this paper are embodied in using PCA to understand the various attribute groupings and to illuminate trust impact factors in the Chinese context. When they understand the critical factors affecting trust better, owners and contractors can devise more appropriate strategies to improve performance.