Thesis (Eng.D.)--City University of Hong Kong, 2009. / "Submitted to Department of Building and Construction in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Engineering Doctorate." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 189-202)

This study deals with a topic which, probably more than any other, directly involves the continuing challenges of development and the improvement of the living environment in Developing Countries, but with particular reference to Saudi Arabia. It is through Project Management that Owners can direct and manage the myriad tasks and activities which are needed to accomplish the design and construction of diverse facilities. Virtually anyone with a modest knowledge of what is involved in the management of a large construction project knows that it is no simple task. The study does not attempt to develop an inflexible methodology, but, rather a concept which could be revised and perfected. The author's own experience in recent years has confirmed the validity and usefulness of a particular approach to project management. This study is an attest to provide a system which differs from all other known systems and which will serve the needs of the building owner to give him a greater degree of control in the construction process. It acknowledges that owners cannot possibly provide all the necessary technical expertise, so the system should be simple, covering important issues, and ignoring tasks which are the responsibility of specialist consultants. It is written primarily for personnel involved in policy making and decision taking. Thus the contents are aimed at construction executives, architects, engineers, financiers and others involved in the planning, design, construction, operation and financing of a large scale project. ii The study attempts to arrive at a system which encourages an atmosphere of creative thinking and an acceptance of change. It is, therefore, an organised, systematic approach recognising and containing the elements of planning, scheduling and estimating as well as consultant and contractor selection, tendering, reporting, control and analysis of the important variables of time, money and quality.

A construction project requires a multitude of people with different skills and interests and the coordination of a wide range of disparate, yet interrelated, activities. Such complexity is further compounded by the unique characteristics of a project and many other external uncertainties. As a result, construction is subject to more risk than other business activities. In a risky situation, individuals or organizations perceive the situation in their own ways and behave differently to meet their own interests. Many researchers have asserted that divergent risk attitudes are sources of mismatched risk perceptions and inconsistent behaviors among project participants in different organizations, which can disturb proactive and consistent organizational activities. The research on risk attitude has, therefore, been advocated to exploring ways to consistently arouse people‘s cognition, affection, and behavior among stakeholders. However, previous research has been a widely misunderstood concept and remains a fragmented focus in the construction field. Evidence on the construction of risk attitude and how it manifests itself is unavailable. To date, prior researchers have suffered from an issue-oriented focus that has resulted in simplified models by studying single level of antecedents of risk attitude and consequences of management performance, rather than multi-level. Moreover, previous studies only focused on the direct relationship between risk attitude and management performance instead of providing a profound conceptualization of the indirect relationship between risk attitude and management performance or empirically exploring risk attitude‘s antecedents and consequences. The current study seeks to bridge this research gap. Triangulation research is employed as an appropriate research methodology in which both qualitative and quantitative data collection are used to test the research propositions. The research plan draws upon ontology and methodological pluralism. By adopting the Critical Incident Technique (CIT), coupled with an intensive literature review, one can explore the manifestation of risk attitude and its antecedents by analyzing critical incidents derived from preliminary interviews. Cognitive Motivation Theory (CMT) and Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) provide rationales to combine a processed view of risk attitude and the antecedents and management performance of individuals and organizations into a multi-level model of risk attitude. Responses to a questionnaire survey of 239 individuals nested in 61organizations were analyzed with a blend of Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) to establish and examine the hypothesized relationships in the theoretical model. To capture the practical manifestation of risk attitude and its influence on management performance, case studies of two ongoing construction projects were performed. The findings summarized from both qualitative and quantitative studies indicated that risk attitude diverged due to the multi-level influences of its antecedents on project participants, resulting in inconsistent risk perception and risk inclinations. Risk attitude has two levels of manifestation – an individual and organization level. Individual risk attitude manifests itself as cognition, affection, and behavioral inclination, while organizational risk attitude mainly shows up as managerial trust, formalization, an ambiguity of goals and objectives, and a merit system. The findings confirmed that motivated individuals tend to present more consistent risk attitude and be more willing to and capable of exhibiting good management performance. The motivation behind this study is beyond the traditional motivational means. It extends from internal motivation with its locus of control and self-efficacy to external motivation with its interpersonal exchanges, external controls, and observational learning. The risk attitudes of motivated people to evoke better management performance, especially in the process of integrating risk management into a safety management system and the outcome performance of a stakeholder‘s satisfaction and potential to organizations. The research attempts to advance risk attitude theory by re-conceptualizing the antecedents of risk attitude and the consequences of management performance make the underlying theorizing mechanism explicit and testable. This study also provides practical indications of concrete interventions by managers to make risk attitudes converge and then strengthen safety risk management. The thesis contributes to multi-level analysis in the management research field and differentiates the different levels of participants in construction projects. Methodological pluralism and blended qualitative and quantitative research methods will be addressed to demonstrate the different and complementary perspectives of research. Due to limited samples, the generalizability of the findings in the different project types or across other levels needs to be further verified. / published_or_final_version / Real Estate and Construction / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

No description available.

Construction project organisation is a complex human system. Despite the formal governance structure of project, construction works and activities still rely primarily on informal personal contacts of the participants. It is the “here-andnow” interactions and mutual adjustment of project participants that underpins daily construction operations. From the perspective of social learning theory, human interactions in project organization involve learning. In this context, the social nature of learning comes to prominence. Learning embodies the accommodation and adjustment of the project participants’ expectation and tacit nuances prevalent in the interactions among participants. As a human system, the organization of project participants in a project forms a social network. The relational links of participants embedded within the network act as an important resource. This resource, especially the goodwill engendered among the participants, can be used to facilitate actions. Such goodwill is referred to as social capital. The combination of these two perspectives enables the construction of a model of the project team. Social capital engendered in the project organization can be appropriated to facilitate positive actions. In this line of conception, the network of relationships among the project participants may offer mutual support for the cultivation of reflective practices and learning in terms of adaptation, integration, and cooperation. Because social capital is the primordial form of social phenomenon, it is postulated that social capital provides the conditions necessary for learning to take place, and learning, in turn, contributes to project success – that is, project learning mediates the impact of social capital on project success. To test this hypothesis and a series of other related propositions, empirical studies had been carried out within the Hong Kong construction industry. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were adopted in the empirical studies – questionnaire survey and case studies were conducted. Findings reveal that a more integrative procurement arrangement, management commitment, project team appraisal system that emphasises team working, participants’ intensive interactions, positive personality all contribute to the formation of project social capital, while multiple managerial hierarchies, subcontractor-induced problems, government transparency requirement, goals mismatch, and bureaucratic contract administration all impede its formation. In project organisation, the overlapping of both formal and informal organisational structures occupied by personnel with both technical and managerial capabilities improves project organising efficiency. Indeed, with the mediational thesis generally supported – the impact of social capital on project performance is mediated through learning - and the emergence of a new personal dimension, social capital is a critical antecedent to project organising. However, because social capital and learning affect the soft rather than hard success criteria, other factors need to be considered for overall project performance. These other factors are the capabilities of all project parties and the adoption of relational contracting norms and behaviours. It is the combination of all these factors with social capital as the substrate of participants’ interactions that are most likely to lead to overall project performance. / published_or_final_version / Real Estate and Construction / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

No description available.

Thesis (M. S.)--Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. / Committee Chair: Jochen Teizer; Committee Member: Ioannis Brilakis; Committee Member: Michael Meyer.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 193-194).

Subcontractors have finite resources that should be allocated simultaneously across many projects in a dynamic manner. Significant scheduling problems are posed by concurrent multi-projects with limited resources. Unfortunately, with a lack of appropriate models, subcontractors mostly make decisions based on their previous experiences to allocate their resources to multiple projects. Moreover, subcontractors frequently reallocate their resources in response to schedule changes and site conditions. In response to schedule changes or project demand, these factors should be taken into account before reallocating resources: site conditions, completion dates, overtime usage, productivity, and complementarity. This research has developed a descriptive cost model for a subcontractor with multi-resources and multi-projects. The model was designed for a subcontractor to use as a decision-making tool for resources allocation and scheduling. The model identified several factors affecting productivity. Moreover, when the model was tested using hypothetical data, it produced some effective combinations of resource allocation with associated total costs. The objective of this thesis is to identify the effect of productivity changes on the total cost resulting from shifting crews across projects using a descriptive model. Furthermore, a subcontractor minimizes total costs by balancing overtime costs, tardiness penalties, and incentive bonus, while satisfying available processing time constraints. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 225-231).