Practitioners operating within the construction industry are faced with considerable challenges and difficulties when attempting to manage their supply chains and obtain value for money. This work highlighted that in response to these problems, recent industry reports and academic literature have called for the adoption of more sophisticated 'best practice' approaches including proactive integrated supply chain management to provide significant commercial benefits and alter construction's supposed obsolete practices. This advice has been contested by a number of academic writers, who are more sceptical about whether generic approaches can be claimed to be 'best practice', without providing a convincing and robust methodological justification. In response to this ongoing debate, and following the power and appropriateness school of thought, this thesis developed testable hypotheses regarding the ability of construction clients and contractors to implement specific sourcing approaches under particular external power circumstances, and the impact that internal capabilities has on the ability of buyers to effectively implement proactive or reactive sourcing approaches. In testing the hypotheses, it has been demonstrated that the implementation of proactive approaches to upstream supply management are not appropriate (or possible) in all supply chain circumstances and power structures and therefore, reactive sourcing approaches may be the most effective supply strategy for some buyers, or indeed their only option.

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This thesis identifies an area of construction that is under-researched from both the construction and insurance perspectives. This an industry sector that remains unrecognised as a potential source of new business that is capable of producing a continuity of work consistently over time, possibly in perpetuity. The sector remains unattractive partially through a failure to realise that the work volumes are significant in the terms of both job frequency and total annual spend. An annual spend that is unrecognised as contributing approximately 10% of all private work undertaken within the small works industry. This research therefore undertakes an investigation to identify and understand the unique and novel characteristics exhibited by this sector that set it apart from other forms of construction activity.

The issue of unethical behaviour in construction public contracting is not a new phenomenon and many initiatives have been put in place to curb such behaviour. However, ethical behaviour has shown no improvement over the years. Previous studies in the construction industry have focused on the nature of the unethical behaviour that takes place rather than exploring the means and strategies to tackle the problem. This necessitates research to identify the influencing factors of unethical behaviour in bidding in order to improve the business ' standards/processes in construction contracting. This involves investigating the ethical standards of contractors in preparing bids and the relationship with organisational policies that constitute formal ethical measures. The research was conducted in the Malaysian context, undertaken from a qualitative research design perspective. Data were collected from three case studies through observation, interviews and documentary evidence. The analysis was carried out in three stages: (1) coding, (2) context, mechanisms and outcome and 3. cross-case analysis. Some pre-determined concepts were used but the analysis remained open to emergent findings. This provided an in-depth understanding of how ethical standards come about and how these influence the bid preparation. The findings suggest a relationship between organisational policies and bidding team members' job performance. However, this relationship is more complex in regards to the ethical conduct of the bidding teams. In this regards, middle managers were found to have significant influence on the behaviour of team members and it is inferred that top management seek to control approaches used in the bidding process. Therefore, formalised procedures, such as anti-corruption pledges and standard operating procedures, have no impact on the ethical conduct of the bidding team members, as they do not provide any insight into the actual tasks. Similarly, although the clients' rules have an influence on ethical behaviour in bidding, such rules, however, are project-specific and do not always fit with routine activities. The findings call for more in-depth studies to improve our understanding about the ethical standards of construction organisations in different contexts. This will help regulators and practitioners become acquainted with areas for improvement

The importance of knowledge as a key determinant of organisational competitiveness and better performance is increasingly appreciated by both academics and practitioners. The UK construction industry is perceived as one of the knowledge based value creating sectors of the economy; however, it faces many challenges, especially in terms of performance, due to its intrinsic nature. Different knowledge based solutions to overcome this problem have been proposed in the past. Previous work on knowledge management in the construction industry has focused heavily on the delivery of technological solutions. Therefore, this study argues that personalisation strategies supporting the process-based view of knowledge, to enhance generation and utilisation of employees' tacit knowledge, would be much more relevant to overcome performance problems in the construction industry. In this context, the following research problem is articulated for empirical investigation: What is the role of tacit knowledge in achieving better performance, and how could tacit knowledge be managed in construction employees? The research problem was investigated by developing a conceptual framework, drawing from the literature and pilot interviews, addressing the process of tacit knowledge management. The social constructionism philosophy with the case study approach was adopted for this study. The conceptual framework was refined and validated empirically through a single longitudinal case study, comprising two phases: an exploratory phase and an explanatory phase. Interviews and structured surveys were used as the principal data collection techniques. The primary data analysis techniques used for the study were content analysis, cognitive mapping and descriptive statistics. The case study findings challenge the prevailing focus on codification strategies of knowledge management in construction organisations, which do not recognise the process-based view of knowledge. Further, it reveals the main sources of tacit knowledge generation and acquisition, both internal and external to an organisation, and factors affecting tacit knowledge utilisation at individual, group and organisational levels. The study introduces a systematic process and five stage maturity approach for tacit knowledge management. It concludes by stressing the importance of strengthening the sources of tacit knowledge acquisition, addressing the factors that affect tacit knowledge utilisation, and evaluating performance of process and outcomes of tacit knowledge management in construction organisations.

Recently, the UAB has witnessed an increase of foreign direct investments in the construction industry sector and where people from distinct national cultures are confronted with unfamiliar interaction patterns and communication styles, different business goals and logic, all of which may be difficult to deal with or interpret. In the present scenario, effective cross-cultural management has become essential for the success of business relationships. The existing literature is mainly concerned with relationships involving parties within single cultural domains and lacks conceptualization beyond borders. Although a lot of scholars have produced numerous valuable works on cross-cultural management, communication, and marketing, they seem to agree that most of the studies have been western-oriented or mostly produced and generally validated according to the western or rather the American standards. Others (Hofstede 1980; Laurent 1986; Jackson 1995; Alpander and Carter 1995 and Evans et a1.l995) seem to agree that the implementation of management development activities or the evaluation of existing activities, in different cultures must be undertaken with an understanding of the underlying traditions and values of that culture. The failure to take national differences between countries into account has been the cause of many business failures (Ricks, 1993). As a result, there is a dearth of research in cross-cultural communication, management and marketing in the Arab world in general, and the U.A.E in particular and there are areas that have not been covered by the scholars at all. Therefore, this study assesses client-contractor relationships. It also intends to investigate the issues of cross-cultural management in the construction industry. A mixed approach (qualitative inquiry and quantitative survey) was carried out in the construction industry. Due to the nature of this research topic and as previous qualitative research carried out in Arab countries (Hill et al, 1998), this one has its challenges. Moreover, as the researcher is a woman from the UAE, she is expected to overcome barriers of research access to construction companies and senior managers, dominated by male gender. The study has made some important contributions. No doubt, it has added to the exiting knowledge culture in business relationships and filling the gap of cross- cultural and communication relationship within one industry. Therefore, a conceptual framework to understand these relationships was developed and tested. Moreover, the study provides very useful information on the national UAE working women.

For some considerable time, client satisfaction has been a problematic issue in the UK construction industry with many projects failing to satisfy the client needs and meet or exceed the client expectations. Client satisfaction is, however, a key performance measure and a major determinant of project success. There is a common belief that strategic decisions made by clients have a significant impact on the levels of client satisfaction. Strategic decisions in the context of construction projects are often associated with project stages including pre-design, design, tender, construction, occupancy & maintenance and disposal and vary in nature. Consequently the impact of strategic decisions on client satisfaction depends as much on timing as on the subjects of the decisions. While such findings are useful to facilitate the industry’s focus on addressing the failure in achieving client satisfaction, and point to the route for improvement, they are arbitrary and do not provide a systematic basis for investigating the real impact on client satisfaction. The nature of strategic decisions and the significance of its impact on client satisfaction have not been clearly identified and client satisfaction has remained an elusive issue for a majority of construction professionals. This research was hence undertaken to seek empirical evidence of an interrelationship between strategic decisions and client satisfaction. Defining strategic decisions, often associated with project stages, as ones that are complex and made under uncertainty and have a long-term impact on project success, a quantitative research methodology combined with qualitative approaches, was adopted in investigating the interrelationship between strategic decisions and client satisfaction. Findings of a detailed literature review revealed that client satisfaction at any stage depends as much on the service quality attributes of service providers including overall service delivery, people of service providers and communications with clients as on the influence of strategic decisions and the client itself. These performance attributes and the groups of strategic decisions, referred as strategic decision cluster (SDC), were further assessed and the relationships between these measures and strategic decisions were examined using factor analysis and multiple regression modelling techniques. Analyses revealed SDCs including Design Approach, Procurement and Implementation predict better the outcomes of service quality and hence higher levels of client satisfaction. Service delivery and communications with clients have a positively significant correlation with the levels of client satisfaction. Of these two attributes, communications with clients makes the largest unique contribution to the variance and is considered the better predictor for client satisfaction. The developed models is validated via external and internal validation and the findings support the thesis that strategic decisions have a impact on client satisfaction by strongly influencing the performance of service quality although causality cannot be assumed. It is recommended that service providers including contractors and consultants devote more efforts to improve their performance on the attributes of service quality identified as having significant association with client satisfaction, particularly service delivery and communications with clients. Further research efforts focusing on providing a practical tool or expert system so as to address the practical issues for a wider range of clients and service providers are also recommended.