The Effects Of Social Capital On Construction Project Success:An Empirical Study

With the improvement of China’s economic level and the promotion of urbanization, the construction project plays an increasingly prominent role in the national economy. However, many problems still remain, such as the low efficiency, high cost, low quality, as well as disputes and conflicts. Therefore, the most important task for project managers is to solve these problems and improve the working relationship satisfaction between the parties involved in the construction project. Social capital is an important factor to ensure construction project success by facilitating the exchange of information and resource availability within the organization and reducing information asymmetry. Moreover, opportunistic behavior of the project participants will exacerbate the escalation of conflicts, which is not conducive to maintain working relationship, and thus leads to the failure of the project; and contractual governance has an important impact on the opportunism.First, based on the review of the literature on social capital, opportunism and contractual governance, this paper tries to explore the relationship between social capital and opportunism, and the role they play in construction project success from the perspective of social capital theory, combined with the transaction cost theory and the principal-agent theory. After that, an integrated conceptual model has been proposed to explore an active role the contractual governance plays in reducing the impact of opportunism. From the dimension of social capital structure, relational dimension and cognitive dimension, the model studies the inhibitory effect of social capital on opportunism, and the positive impact on the success of construction project, opportunism and construction project success, as well as the impact of contractual governance in reducing opportunism effect on project success. In order to analyze the specific relationship between the variables, we use the empirical research method through a questionnaire, and collect 225 research samples. By using PLS and SPSS software to analyze the data, the conclusions are drawn as follows:(1) The structural dimension, relational dimension and cognitive dimension of social capital have a significant positive impact on construction project success;(2) Opportunism has a negative effect on construction project success;(3) Contract governance plays a moderating role in the relationship between opportunism and construction project success.(4) The structural dimension and relational dimension of social capital have an inhibitory effect on opportunism, while the cognitive dimension of social capital has no significant effect on opportunism.