The Impact Of Project Relationship Quality On Project Performance

The relationship under project background is gaining wide attentions from international and national scholars and practitioners. The core of those is the relationship in industries or projects, thus, the project performance and the industrial efficiency can be improved with the relationship method. In China, overspending cost, delaying the time limit for a project and dissatisfaction from stakeholders often appear in construction engineering projects, which will affect project performance. Among a series of methods solving these problems, improving relationship quality between project participants perhaps is an effective approach. However the people's cognition of the revelancy between project relationship quality and project performance is limited to conceptions. Especially in China the deep impact relation about those is seldom debated. Thus according construction engineering project in our counry, at the relationship quality angle, the paper theoretically analyzes and empirically test the the revelancy between project relationship quality and project performance in order to enrich related theory knowledges and direct related practices.The research approach is theory analysis——theory hypothesis——stastically test. The data is obtained from questionnaire. Adoptting Factor Analysis, Multi regression and Structure equation model methods, the paper analyzes and discusses the dimention of relationship quality and performance and their impacting relation according Chongqing's construction engineering projects.The innovation and contribution from the paper are:1. Base on literature research and visition to practitioners and according Industry/Interaction worknet and Society Exchange theory, the paper circles the connotation of project relationship and relationship quality, bring forward the key construct of the projects relationship quality comprised trust, commitment, communication, cooperation and fairness, and then develops reliable and validable scale. Different from existing research, the paper increase the equity in relationship quality, which contributes to relationship research under project background and supports the practice of relationship management in project.2. The paper brings forward the comprehensive measurement frame of project performance based on Stockholder Theory and Balance Scorecard Theory. According that, the paper develops and tests empirically that there are four dimensions including process, quality, innovative learning and stakeholders in construct project. Different from existing research, the paper considers wider angle of views and longer lifecycle in project performance measurement, which provided the direction to the measurement of project performance, and the theoretic principles to various projects with various key performance indexes. At the same time, the connotative indexes of the four factors are interiorly coherent with each other, which can be the benchmark of engineering project management.3. At the angle of relationship quality, the paper empirically test what kind of influence the key construct of projects relationship quality on the system of project performance, and how the influence happen. The current literature only focused on the influence of a certain factor like trust, commitment, communication, cooperation and fairness on a certain performance or the complete performance. While the paper respectively tested the influence of five factors in relation management, that is, trust, commitment, communication, cooperation and fairness on the four factors in project performance, that is, process performance, quality performance, innovative learning performance and stockholder performance. Similar empirical studies seldom appear, thereby, the study is theoretically meaningful to dig into the black box of the influence of relation quality in projects on project performance and offers the research paradigm in the mechanism of action of multi-cause and one effect. Further more, the study can help project managers improve different relations according to key objectives in different projects, so that project performance can be improved.