The Influencing Mechanisim Of Boundary Spanning Roles On Collaborative Relationships Among Engineering Project Paricipants

The nature of coordination and collaboration in engineering projects is boundary spanning interaction involving multiple stakeholders and various knowledge.However,the conflicting demands among project partners easily trigger various incidents that threaten the sound relationships during the boundary spanning interaction.Thus,the project partners are exposed to frequent conflicts which block the collaborative relationships.The boundary spanners(BSs)are located at key position of the collaborative networks and served as important roles in information transfer and external representatives.They are also the first line to defense threat and are potential project leaders.Moreover,BSs' emotional intelligence(EI)is the key factor impacting their boundary spanning roles.As such,the purpose of this dissertation is to advance collaborative relationships in engineering projects by employing the key roles of BSs.To do so,this dissertation investigated the relationships between EI,boundary spanning roles and collaborative relationships building on individualized micro-foundation.The main research contents list as following:This dissertation takes relationship conflicts in engineering project as dynamic and multi-layer chain,consisting of the perceived threat,the boundary spanning roles and partners' relationship conflicts at different levels.This dissertation also added emotion regulation strategy as a moderator in the path of BSs' perceived threat impacting partners' relationship conflicts.The results show that BSs' emotional reappraisal strategy can effectively alleviate their rigid tendency during boundary spanning interaction.This dissertation further developed a mediating model investigating how BSs' perceived threat impacts relationship conflicts through their boundary spanning roles.The results show that BSs' perceived threat makes their boundary spanning roles rigid,leading to relationship conflicts among project partners.Therefore,BSs employing reappraisal strategy can reduce the tendency of interacted rigid as long as perceiving threat,thus blocking the development of threat into inter-organizational relationship conflicts.This study reveals the inherent mechanism how BSs' threat perception causes relationship conflict among project partners due to their threat rigid tendency.The results enrich relavant research on emotional induction mechanism regarding the individual-level antecedents of relationship conflict in projects.This dissertation put emergency theory into project leadership and develops a morphogenetic cycle to study the leadership emergency process.Then,this dissertation built three stochastic actor-oriented models of leadership network-strategic leading roles,task guiding roles and relationship integration roles.This dissertation further explored the influence of different dimensions from EI on three kinds of shared leadership networks.The results show that the emergence of engineering project leadership is a dynamic morphogenetic cycle consisting of three steps: leadership perspective taking,emotional regulation behavior and emotional reflection.Moreover,BSs' EI can prompt their leadership emergence.The requirement of specific EI is different regarding to three leadership networks.The strategic leading network is highly related to BSs' ability of using emotions.The ability to regulate emotions is more important for the emergence of front-line tasks and relationship leadership roles in engineering projects.This can be attributed to the complexity of engineering projects and the high-pressure environment which easily causes emotional bursts.This dissertation provides a new breakthrough for the transformation from vertical project leadership paradigm to distributed project leadership,paving the way to formation mechanism of shared leadership in engineering projects.After discussing the threat reducing and shared leadership roles of BSs,this dissertation finally built a moderated mediation model to explore the positive effect of BSs' EI on partners' relationship quality.The results show that BSs with perceived threat can effectively improve partners' relationship quality through the mediation of boundary spanning behaviors.That is to say,high EI helps BSs effectively exert boundary spanning roles to advance collaborative relationships even in the situation filled with various threat.The lower-level BSs' EI is higher related to relationship quality through their boundary spanning behaviors compared to that of higher-level BSs.Shared leadership can serve as a moderator to improve the mediation effect of BSs' behaviors linking their EI and partners' relationship quality through their behaviors.Shared leadership supplements the weakness of different-level BSs' behaviors,thus further contributing to relationship quality among project partners.This provides new practical guidance for the training and selection of BSs in construction engineering industry.