Back, W E; Grau, D and Mejia-Aguilar, G (2013) Effectiveness evaluation of contract incentives on project performance. International Journal of Construction Education and Research, 9(4), pp. 288-306. ISSN 1557-8771
Abstract
Incentive plans are predetermined contract strategies designed to motivate project personnel and/or organizations to achieve prescribed project performance objectives. Incentive plans may be designed in a variety of ways and can be used singularly or in combination, allowing project sponsors to apply several different motivational strategies concurrently on a given project. This article addresses the issue of incentive effectiveness and investigates the actual influence of incentive strategies on measures of project performance. Data was collected in two phases and included capturing case study information from multiple project organizations and a subsequent detailed survey instrument that included over 90 project respondents. The findings indicate that the implementation of contract incentive strategies can have widely varied levels of effectiveness and may not actually yield the assumed benefits to overall measures of cost and schedule performance. Furthermore, some projects reported that incentives actually created unexpected or adverse consequences or lost their viability during project execution.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | construction project management; contracts; project controls |
| Index terms: | effectiveness, project performance, construction project management, implementation, project control, case study, contract strategy, incentive plan, personnel, project sponsor, schedule performance, strategy, survey, project organization |
| Subjects: | data collection methods, control systems, sociology, project controls, performance management, management, project management theory and practice, contractual arrangements, organizational theory |
| Topics: | Project Management, Procurement, Quality Management, Research Practice, Business Strategy, Stakeholder Management, Human Resources, Time Control |
| Descriptive scope: | 3 PCE |
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