Information behaviour of construction project actors

Construction is one of the largest industry sectors in terms of size and output in the UK. The sector contributes about 10% directly to the UK’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and drives historical GDP growth. However, construction projects and organisations continue to underperform at significant levels which is underpinned by actors' information behaviours (IBs). The pursuit of improvement has resulted in high-level research in information modelling, information flow, and integrated project delivery. This has highlighted the need for research and improvement strategies on information seeking, sharing and integrated working. Despite the significance of the underlying attributes to project failures and underperformance, not much attention has been devoted to actors' IBs and/or Information-Seeking Behaviours (ISBs). As a result, insights into the information culture, the IBs and ISBs of actors in construction organisations remain elusive in extant literature. Similarly, research into the factors that influence actors' information-seeking and information use/task performance behaviours remains hidden. Hence, this research empirically investigates the fundamental behaviours by which project actors seek, share and use information, and the factors that influence such behaviours in Construction organisations. The study employed qualitative and quantitative inquiries to investigate actors in construction organisations and project environments to test the commonality of archetypical Information seeking behaviour types (ISBTs) which were distilled from literature. This enabled assessments of the extent of actors' adoption of a particular ISBT and the key factors that influence their decision-making during task performance. Analysis of quantitative and qualitative data revealed five key ISBTs (such as associate, cognitive, systematic, serendipity/fortuitous and social media ISBT) that actors exhibit during task performance. In addition, the study found seven (7) key information-seeking behaviours factors (such as accessibility, collaboration, work condition, age, source/channels, trust and organisational setup) that predict actors' ISBTs. In addition, 10 key factors (such as accuracy, currency, context specific, efficiency, effectiveness, relevance, reliability, satisfaction, quality and useable) were found to influence actors' ISBTs. By way of consolidating the research findings, an ISBT model was developed. The model indicates the relationship between the influencing information seeking and information use/task performance factors and the ISBTs. In view of these findings, it is vital to plan construction project delivery and organisation management to integrate actors' ISBTs into the project life cycle (PLC) to enhance performance improvement. Similarly, organisation need to create avenues to support actors' ISB preferences during the design development phases to facilitate effective information-seeking, information sharing and information use.