The Empirical Study On Impact Relationship Between Opportunism, Trust And Project Success In Construction Project

With the acceleration of China’s rapid economic and social development and urbanization process, the new buildings appear constantly, the construction industry has become an important pillar of China’s economic development, and its status in the national economy becomes more and more important. However, construction industry suffers from low efficiency and poor performance in a long period. Construction is a typical project-driven industries, construction companies’revenue and profit comes from a specific project. Thus, in the field of construction industry, how to improve project success is always the core proposition. Scholars from the perspective of project management and project governance have done a great deal of discussion. In General, the project contains a lot of participants, including owners, contractors, subcontractors, designers, engineers. These participants from different organizations often have some differences in interests, and their relationships are often shown antagonistic and invalid. Along with more and more large scale construction project, involving increasingly wide-ranging, the technical difficulty and organizational difficulty is also increasing, and the interconnected and interrelated relationships within the project participants or relationships between participants and external stakeholders is more complex.Relationship between the various participants in the project are to a large extent depends on the cooperation behaviors between them. The assumptions about participants’behaviors, transaction cost theory and relational exchange theory pointed out that opportunism and trust are two modes of behavior s exists in participants’ relationship. During the project construction, patterns of behaviors, as well as the cooperation relationship formed on the basis of those behaviors will affect the project success directly. Therefore, further study of the opportunism and trust in project is essential, and it is important for managers to improve the efficiency of construction project and to ensure project success. From the current study, although as two basic patterns of behaviors opportunism and trust has received a lot of research from the perspective of transaction cost theory and relational exchange theory, these study often consider them separately instead of studying them together.On basis of the transaction cost exchange theory and relational exchange theory, this study analyzes the impact relationship between opportunism, trust and project success depending on external uncertainty and complexity, and uses the structural equation model to test these hypotheses. Results show that:1. Uncertainty negatively affects trust and positively affects opportunism, but complexity has no such effects; 2. Opportunism and trust counteract each other, trust positively affects project success (measured by project performance and relationship satisfaction); opportunism negatively affects relationship satisfaction and negatively affects project performance through the mediating of relationship satisfaction; 3. The positive effect of trust on project success differs under varying cooperation duration. This study addresses the important of restraining opportunism and developing trust, especially for developing trust, to achieve project success, which provides implications for the improvement of the construction project efficiency.