A Study Of Construction Project Participants’ Partnering Experience,Contractual Governance And Contract Design

The contract serves as an importance governance mechanism in construction projects,and it has long been concerned in the inter-organizational transaction research field.However,a review of contractual governance and contract design reveals some unsolved problems.For instance,scholars have inconsistent views about the effect of the contract on performance and the change patterns of contract design features with the accumulation of partnering experience.Besides,the effect of partnering experience on performance has also been discussed a lot in industrial and academic circles while existing researches have not reached consensus on this issue.This research attempts to uncover the cause of inconsistence in the literature,offering a logical explanation for contractual governance and the change process of contract design features with partnering experience.Based on the theories of transaction cost economics and organizational learning,as well as a functional approach(i.e.,contractual control,coordination and adaptation)from the contract theory,a theoretical framework containing partnering experience,contractual complexity,satisfaction and cooperative behavior is developed to investigate the influence of contractual complexity in construction projects and the evolution of contractual complexity during repeated partnering experience.Empirical approach using questionnaire survey was conducted to validate the theoretical model.The results demonstrate that partner-specific experience increases satisfaction and cooperative behavior,mediated by contractual complexity.Besides,contractual complexity of three functions has different effects on two types of cooperative behavior.Furthermore,by distinguishing two types of partnering experience(i.e.partner-specific experience and general partnering experience),different learning effects are discerned in contractual complexity of three functions.The two paths of learning are interpreted by introducing interorganizational routines and contract design capability.The theoretical implications of this research mainly include the following three aspects.First,partner-specific experience overall can promote better project performance,verifying the efficacy of contract as a formal governance mechanism.Second,by analyzing and examing the different governance effects of three contractual functions,this research conduces to a refined orientation for future research on contract governance.Third,by comparing the different processes of absorbing partnering experience into contract amelioration for different contractual functions,it is demonstrated that the efforts made by organizations to improve contract design capability are purposive and selective,thus deepening the understanding of contract design and organizational learning.There are some practical implications in this research as well.Construction project managers are encouraged to pay more attention to long-term collaborative relationships with partners.This research also enlightens managers in that they can classify the massive and complicated contract provisions with a more systematic and integrated perspective and use them in a more specific way.Besides,mangers can apply past experience in improving existing contracts,and they can also regard contracts per se as knowledge repositories which can be relied on to learn knowledge about project governance.