Relational partnership in public construction organizations: Front-line employee perspective

The adoption of relational contracting (RC) has been increasingly used by parties in various developed countries as one of the innovative tools in traditional contracting to achieve benefits such as cost savings, schedule reduction, reduced litigation, improved teamwork, increased trust, stronger relationships, and overall satisfaction. However, the adoption of RC in public-sector construction organizations has been observed to encounter difficulties when compared with implementation in private-sector organizations because of typical barriers, including a lack of understanding of partnering principles and personality indifference, in addition to a low offer mentality, ineffective top management, and a lack of positive working-level commitment. Studies in this area conducted with the objective of ensuring the effective implementation of RC in public-sector organizations are also limited. In view of this, this study aims at exploring the factors that will have an important impact on developing RC practices and the relationship between the contractor and the public firm. Previous studies focused on the identification of the success factors of RC, but those studies were limited to RC implementation from a top management perspective only. Thus, this study investigates the critical factors in RC that are necessary to produce successful relational partnerships in public organizations exclusively from the perspective of front-line employees. The front-line employees include junior engineers and assistant engineers, who are responsible for the day-to-day management of construction activities. An extensive literature review offered 9 important relational contract success factors that were identified and measured by 29 indicators. The data were collected from 202 operational-level employees at four public-sector construction organizations in India. The structural equation modeling technique was used for data analysis. The critical factors identified from the study are training, organizational change, commitment of top management, partner selection, and the assessment process. Organizational change for partnering emerged from this study as one of the new critical factors. The findings from this study could be used to improve the relational partnerships of public organizations.