Research On Relationship Between Trust And Cooperation

With the rapid development of society, the scale of China’s fixed asset investment inrecent years has continued to show growth. Along with that, the relationship between ownerand contractor becomes more complex and engineering disputes happen frequently, whichgreatly restricts the performance of project management. In this case, the contracting partiesare defined as opposing and less efficient contractual relationship with prevalent adversarialthinking. Contractor selects unbalanced bidding for its own sake, serching all ways to offerlow and claim high; while owner arranges an unreasonable risk sharing when contracting, totransfer its own risk to the contractor blindly. Such uncooperative behaviors fill theconstruction market greatly and hinder the further standardization of the construction market.If the contracting parties choose a positive and mutually beneficial cooperation paradigm, itwill be a win-win choice.Trust as an important variable of relational governance theory has begun to receiveattention in the field of project management research. Research on improving projectmanagement performance has become increasingly dependent on the confidence of thevariables. Although scholars conducted a preliminary study of relationship between trust andcooperation, the studies are not in depth. Only clearing the relationship between trust andcooperation can promot function of cooperation in project management performanceimprovement.On the basis of the existing literature, the study put forward trust premium the asmanipulated variable between trust and cooperation, divided the trust into competence-basedtrust and integrity-based trust, and built conceptual models and propose hypotheses. Thequestionnaire survey was conducted in Tianjin, Beijing, Shandong, Hunan, Hubei and otherprovinces in mainland China, and124valid questionnaires copies were collected. Throughliterature analysis, the study foundi the initial measurement provisions of variables, and usedthe data collected to test reliability and validity of measurement tools. Finally, the study usedstructural equation modeling (SEM) and SPSS regression analysis to test the theoreticalhypothesis and obtained following conclusions. Firstly, trust is antecedent to promotecooperation in project organization. Secondly, the effect of different types of trust on projectmanagement performance is not in the same weight. Statistics analysis found that underChinese management scenarios, competence-based trust contributes more for cooperationthan integrity-based trust. This finding also made the following inspiration for projectmanagement in China: On the one hand, to improve the training system of competence-basedtrust; on the other hand, to consider the training of integrity-based trust to enhance its impactcooperation in the future. Thirdly, trust premium can positively regulate the relationshipbetween the trust and cooperation. This study systematically explored the relationship between different dimensions of trustand cooperation, and introducing trust premium as adjustment variable to establish theoreticalmodel, which was further tested by structural equation model. In this paper, the assumptionhas been verified, based on which the management inspiration was proposed, namelyincreasing trust to establish assurance mechanisms to promote bilateral cooperation contract,in order to improve project management performance as the final aim.