Love, P E D (2025) Boosting: Improving people's decision-making competences in construction. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 151(12): 06025002, ISSN 0733-9364
Abstract
Boosting is an intervention that empowers people to improve their decision-making competences, make informed choices, and enhance their situational awareness. As a result, people can learn to make the best decisions by taking advantage of external structures, cues, and information available in their environment. However, ill-informed decision-making and (in)actions during construction routinely contribute to errors resulting in nonconformances requiring rework. By fostering competences or developing new ones, boosts can be designed to enable specific behaviors that can be used to reduce nonconformances and improve quality in construction. This paper examines the choices confronted by individuals during the construction of a transport megaproject that inadvertently impacted quality. It uses knowledge from quality-related events to demonstrate that the potential of uncertainty management boosts the fostering of procedural rules for making good decisions. With boosting being a high-impact and low-cost investment, construction organizations have access to a strategy that can be used to build their workforce's long-term competences and learning capacity, enabling improvements in quality to be realized. The contributions of this paper are twofold: (1) it demonstrates how construction organizations can potentially use insights from behavioral science to empower their workforce to take responsibility for improving quality; and (2) it identifies avenues for research to design boosts that can be applied to enhance quality-related choices and in other areas, such as workplace health and safety.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | boosting; choices; construction; empowerment; quality; rework; uncertainty |
| Index terms: | decision-making, competence, megaproject, health and safety, empowerment, science, rework, strategy, uncertainty management, construction organization |
| Subjects: | health safety and environment, specialized education, organization, strategic project management, operations management, personnel development, management, decision analysis, risk assessment |
| Topics: | Business Strategy, Human Resources, Risk Management, Project Management, Health and Safety, Education |
| Descriptive scope: | 2 PC |
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