Do Prior Interactions Breed Cooperation In Construction Projects:The Mediating Role Of Contract

In construction projects,contractors' cooperative behavior is crucial to the success of the projects.But the inter-organizational cooperative behavior is not automatically achieved due to the information asymmetry and interest difference between owners and contractors.The academic circle has realized that relational governance and contractual governance are two mainstream governance mechanisms that play important roles in inter-organizational relationship.However,the effects of relational and contractual governance on cooperation and their interplay are still surrounded with conflicting arguments.Due to the long-term and low frequency of construction projects,leading to that construction project are often regarded as independent and discrete transaction,the presence of prior interactions between the same owner and contractor has been ignored.The prior interactions,as the base of relational governance,may affect subsequent cooperative behavior of contractors.However,it is sparsely noted about how the prior interactions alter subsequent cooperative behavior of contractors in construction projects.Therefore,this study proposes a hypothetical model about the relationship of prior interactions and cooperative behavior,as well as the mediating role of the contract.A questionnaire survey was conducted in Chinese construction projects to test the model.The sample are construction project professionals,who come from top 100 contracting enterprises in China,with rich experience in project management.First,the reliability and validity of the scales were assessed.The Exploratory Factor Analysis(EFA)was used to assess the validity of multi-item scales that were transferred from general management field or self-developed.And then,Independent Sample t-Test was checked to confirm that the different working experience of the sample wouldn't influence the results.Finally,multiple linear hierarchical regressions were computed on SPSS 19.0 to test the hypotheses.The results demonstrates that prior interactions are positively associated with cooperative behavior,and contractual coordination mediates prior interactions and cooperative behavior.This study takes an integrated perspectives of sociology and transaction cost economics to test the effects of prior interactions on cooperative behavior and the partial mediating role of contractual coordination.These findings address interconnectedness of construction projects rather than the dependent and discrete transactions.Meanwhile,they also provide new insights into interdependence of relational governance and contractual governance,and enrich the understanding of complementarity of the two governance mechanisms.The findings also inspires construction project practitioners to utilize concurrent governance mechanisms of relational governance and contractual governance to boost better cooperation.