A Study On Relationship Between Effectiveness Of Civil Construction Teams And Affecting Factors

As a flexible and effective organization form, team-based structure is widely used by more and more enterprises to acquire advantages in competition, especially in civil construction projects,where almost all companies organized its employees this way. While current theories took excessive interest in abstract factors rooting from psychology and fell short of practice applying, there are still many unsolved problems left behind such as unified standard of evaluating team effectiveness and composing of affecting factors.Furthermore, though current theories intensively probed into general working teams, manufacturing teams, scientific research teams and virtual teams, only limited studies touched civil construction teams.From scientific management principle, this paper focused on effectiveness of civil construction teams, composing of affecting factors, and relations between them. By means of theory research and empirical analysis involved 132 civil construction teams in Jiangsu province, the paper refined and sorted the main factors affecting effectiveness of civil construction teams, calculated each weight of the main factors in 3 kinds of equations.On that basis, the paper gave suggestions for team managers to evaluate and improve their work, so they can predict in time and take measures to build up a high performance team.First of all, the research began with a new point of view. Current researcher are still accustomed to confuse process factors with result factors, it turns out that neither can the models predict in time nor do any good for team managers to take measures. E.g. working design, interdependencies, team composition, the environment, together with some process factors, constitute indicators evaluating team effectiveness in Campion model.As we can see, it is actually an ex-post control theory. From a different point of view, this paper argued that civil construction projects have a remarkable one-time feature and ex-post control theory has little practical significance. In this way, we should distinguish between the process factors and the results factors. Only when we make a distinction between effectiveness of civil construction teams and composing of affecting factors, is it possible to reach the research timeliness goal and improve its practical application value.Second, the research continued with a new theoretical model.Generally, only a few factors were selected to do correlation analysis in existing theoretical studies.It cannot reflect fully the relationship between team effectiveness and factors affecting it. By introducing a new method to get interval numbers, the paper used three-parameter data to explore the relationship.While a three-dimensional model was established to evaluate effectiveness of civil construction teams, the paper used ANP method to improve its reliability. On the other side,15 measurable indicators were selected and divided into groups as independent variable in equations. After that, a hypothetical model which reflected the relationship between effectiveness of civil construction teams and composing of affecting factors was established. In comparison with former models, its wholeness as well as practicability is no doubt all the better.Third, the research explored the relationship with a new method.Either correlation analysis or regression analysis assumed simply a linear relationship between team effectiveness and factors affecting it in existing research. In fact, among various factors relate to civil construction team, it is not necessarily to be a linear relationship. Therefore, implicit assumption should be discussed before any equation models being established. Based on linear, nonlinear and uncertainties assumptions, this paper established 3 different kinds equation models respectively, using SEM and logistic regression method, RBF and GRNN neural network method, Improved Gray Relational Analysis method. Not only analysis of quantitative was conducted to confirm the relationship between team effectiveness and factors affecting it, but also each weight of the four types of affecting factors were calculated using empirical methods to estimate its impact to team effectiveness.Finally, the research came to the conclusion that the main factors affecting effectiveness of civil construction teams include cost factors, team composition factors, team management system factors and team culture factors.While team management system factors were the most important factors, cost factors were confirmed through empirical study to be one of the main factors affecting effectiveness of civil construction teams besides team management system factors and team culture factors.Accordingly, the paper points out that team management system should be adjusted from personal focus to team focus type which highlights all the more team cooperation. Hence, new methods associate with cost factors,team composition factors, team management system factors and team culture factors can be used to build up a high performance team.E.g.,team managing work can be done as follows: (1)To establish or perfect management systems focusing on team objective to enhance effectiveness of civil construction teams.(2)To authorize sufficiently and establish a more scientific mechanism based on Cooperative Game and Signaling Game.(3)To perfect management communication surrounding information sharing.(4)To improve performance evaluation system and reward system based on Repeated Games.(5)To admit cost factors as one of the main factors affecting effectiveness of civil construction teams.(6)To assess dynamically the constraint or the negative effects.(7)To perfect bidding evaluation method for more reasonable bidding price etc.In short, despite the circumstances that the connotation of team effectiveness is very rich, and there are still plenty affecting factors exist as well, team effectiveness can be measured in three dimensions, namely team performance, team member satisfaction and team viability. On the other side, there are mainly four types of affecting factors which can be divided into groups as cost factors, team composition factors,team management system factors and team culture factors. Team managers can find the gap compared with other civil construction team to find their competitive advantage using equation models mentioned above, building effective through team cooperation.