工程项目团队动态特征、冲突维度与项目成功关系实证

Empirical Study on Dynamic Features,Conflict Dimensions and Project Success for Dynamic Teams

为考察项目冲突对项目成功的积极作用,提升项目软要素管理水平,选取利益诉求、依赖性、沟通和信任为项目团队动态特征,从流程冲突、任务冲突和关系冲突三个维度剖析二者交互作用对项目成功的影响,并应用结构方程模型进行实证检验。结果表明:关系冲突、流程冲突与项目成功显著负相关,进而导致项目团队之间沟通不畅,利益诉求变化频繁和信任缺失,使得项目团队采取消极行为阻碍项目成功实现;任务冲突与项目成功显著正相关,有利于促使项目团队的利益诉求趋于稳定、加强项目团队间的沟通和促进项目团队间的信任机制构建。因此在工程项目实施过程中,必须在平等合作的基础上建立项目团队间的信任和沟通机制,以引导任务冲突的正面效应,避免流程冲突和关系冲突的负面影响。

The construction industry plays a major role in economic growth. However, one major characteristic of construction industry is high cost incurred by conflict resolution during project implementation. As a result, project managers need to seek ways to avoid conflicts or resolve them effectively and equitably when they happen. Although project team has become the core operational and management issue for construction projects, many problems still exist in practice. One of the most distinguished problems is project conflict and coordination because project team members have diverse, dynamic and temporary characteristics. Furthermore, the objective, benefit and contractual structure of project team members usually discord with each other and cause project conflicts happen frequently. However the success in construction projects mainly depends on how well project managers handle conflicts. Therefore, the main objective of this empirical research is to reduce project cost and strengthen project management performance by investigating the project conflicts and positive roles of a project manager for project success. There are three project conflict dimensions： relationship conflict, process conflict and task conflict. Conflict is closely related to the interaction of the project team dynamic features, including requirement demand, dependency, communication and trust. This paper discusses the project team dynamic features in term of their evolution and escalation within a construction project and the interaction between project conflict dimension and project success. Furthermore, an empirical theoretical model is established by including project team dynamic features as independent variables, project conflict dimensions as the intermediary variables and project success as the dependent variable. Based on the empirical theoretical model and the nature of construction project, the measuring items are designed in the questionnaire. The Corrected-Item Total Correlation and Cronbach＇s ot reliability coefficient methods are applied to improve the reliability of the measured items. The Construct Reliability and Average Variance Extracted methods are applied to inspecting the combination reliability and convergent validity items used in the survey instrument. Data are collected from large and medium-sized construction projects in Shanghai. To analyze the interaction between project team dynamic features and project conflict, the Structured Equation Model is adopted to examine the established theoretical model. We use another model to examine project team dynamic features as the intermediary variables, project conflict dimensions as the independent variables and project success as the dependent variable. The empirical results show that relationship conflict and process conflict have a significant negative effect on project success. The task conflict has a significant influence on project success. Therefore, in the process of construction project implementation, trust and communication mechanisms between project teams should be established based on equal cooperation. Doing so can increase the chance of project success by minimizing the potential negative effect of relationship and process conflicts.