Ankrah, N A; Proverbs, D and Debrah, Y (2007) A cultural profile of construction project organisations in the UK. In: Boyd, D (ed.) Proceedings of 23rd Annual ARCOM Conference, 3-5 September 2007, Belfast, UK.
Abstract
There is a common belief that the culture of the construction industry has an impact on its performance. The culture of the construction industry at the project level is often associated with such attributes as fragmentation, antagonism, mistrust, poor communication, short-term mentality, blame culture, casual recruitment, machismo and sexism. Whilst such associations are helpful to the extent that they focus attention on the failings of the industry and point to aspects that need to be improved, they are often arbitrary making it difficult to systematically assess the impact of culture on performance. As part of a wider study to empirically examine the impact of culture on performance, construction project organisations (CPOs) were profiled to determine their cultural orientations. Analysis of the data collected through a questionnaire survey revealed five principal cultural dimensions of workforce, performance, team, client and project orientation. Results of a cluster analysis based on these five dimensions of culture yielded five clusters of project organisations. Profiles of the five clusters of CPOs are compared and contrasted and implications for project management and performance outcomes are discussed.
| Item Type: | Conference Paper (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | cluster analysis; construction project organisations; organisational culture; project performance |
| Index terms: | recruitment, project management, organizational culture, construction industry, dimension, questionnaire, project performance, construction project, cluster analysis, project organization, survey, fragmentation, performance outcome |
| Subjects: | management, project management theory and practice, production management, organizational theory, sociology, industry analysis, business, data collection methods, value management, health monitoring assessment and metrics, data analysis and analytics |
| Topics: | Health and Safety, Project Management, Research Practice, Human Resources, Organizational Design |
| Descriptive scope: | 5 PCTEA |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here