Cooperative Behaviors Between Partners In Construction Supply Chain And Its Effect On Performance

At present time,construction industry is sufferring from problems such as low profitability, poor performance, obsolescence of management and technology, and adversary between different actors. This situation is partly due to the characteristics of the industry itself. Construction projects are presumed as "one of a kind" and temporary, there is no trust and shared goal between actors. It also lacks timely effective communication mechanisms, compatible ways of working and efficient mechanisms of problem solving. All these factors lead to the limitated cooperation between actors, and eventually, loss at quality, time and cost. Additionally, many companies in the construction industry are small-medium-sized enterprises, they are facing a fierce market competition. In the context of flawed industrial regulations andpartialized power among actors, adversary between actors and opportunistic behaviors will ensue, finally they will harm the performance. To solve those problems, construction industry adopted the idea of supply chain management(CSCM). The goal of CSCM is to integrate all actors as a team, improve both holistic and individual performance, achieve the win-win situation.Study of contruction supply chain started earlier aboard and it is ahead of the research status at home. After systematically reviewing the researches at home and abroad, the author concluded that the major studies of construction supply chain are mainly in fields as:(1)logistic management of construction supply chain;(2)supply chain designing of engineering companies;(3)the management and application of information technology in contruction supply chain;(4)partner selecting. The author found that in manufacturing industry, researches about the effects between supply chain collaboration, cooperation and performance are of abundence, while the analogical researches in construction supply chain are inadequate, even though this topic is highly concerned by scholars and practitioners. With this consideration, the author empirically analyzed this question, bridged the gap in the research field.This paper defined the conceptions of construction supply chain collaboration, cooperative behavior and construction supply chain performance, interpreted the dimensions of each construct, established the relationship model of construction supply chain collaboration, cooperative behavior and construction supply chain performance based on stuctural equation modeling, then analyzed the empirical data through the statistical software AMOS. The results showed that construction supply chain collaboration has significantly positive effects to performance. However, neither the expected positive effects of collaboration on cooperative behavior nor the effects of cooperative behavior on performance was identified. With this counter-intuitive conclusion in mind, the author verified the results by interviewing employees of more than 30 domestic engineering companies. The responds indicated that at this current time, members in construction supply chains haven’t payed enough attention to the cooperative behavior with their partners. This may be the actual reflection of unbalanced power of different actors in the practice of domestic construction industry.The application of empirical analysis in this study provides a new research method, thus has reference value for practioners. The limitation of this study are as follows:(1)with limited time, the scope of empirical survey is confined, given a larger scope of survey, rusults could be more comprehensive.(2)due to the inadequacy of relevent literature of construction supply chain, there is no consensus of the mesurements of each construct, further confirmation is thus required. Additionally, because of the lacking of energy, the further researches of relationships between specific factors havn’t been analyzed. Continuing study is required to address those issues.