Motivational misalignment on an iconic infrastructure project

Aligning the motivation of contractors and consultants to perform better than 'business-as-usual' on a construction project is a complex undertaking and the costs of failure are high as misalignment can compromise project outcomes. Despite the potential benefits of effective alignment, there is still little information about optimally designing procurement approaches that promote motivation towards 'above business-as-usual' goals. A contribution to this knowledge gap is made by examining the negative drivers of motivation in a major construction project that, despite a wide range of performance enhancing incentives, failed to exceed business-as-usual performance. A case study of an iconic infrastructure project in Australia shows that incentives provided to contractors and consultants to achieve above business-as-usual performance can be compromised by a range of negative motivation drivers including: inequitable contractual risk allocation; late involvement of key stakeholders; inconsistency between contract intentions and relationship intentions; inadequate price negotiation; inconsistency between the project performance goals and incentive goals; and unfair and inflexible incentive performance measurement processes. Future quantitative research is planned to determine the generalizability of these results.