Projects

Research Projects In Dispute Management and Contracting

An Investigation on the Relationships between Organizational Culture and Performance of Construction Organizations There is no shortage of study in organizational culture, particularly in the organizational behavior domain. In this respect, the first objective is to develop a validated organizational culture inventory that can be used to evaluate the ‘culture state’ of a construction organization. It is proposed to examine performance through performance indicators selected for the study. With these, together with the culture dimensions, a theoretical model on organizational culture-performance relationship can be built and tested.

An Examination of the Effects of Equity Sensitivity in Construction Dispute Negotiation The construction industry has been criticized for the high degree of fragmentation, with numerous individual participants striving for their own goals and needs and expecting to maximize their own benefits. In this regard, claims or disputes are often negotiated with an imbalance of power. The issue of "fair exchange" is thus critical to every construction negotiator. Underpinned by a well-established equity theory of Adams (1963), the concept of equity sensitivity (i.e. to explain the dynamics of equity perceptions) is applied to construction dispute negotiation. Specifically, this project aims to investigate the equity sensitivity of construction negotiators, and study its effects on negotiating behaviors and negotiation outcomes. This study will provide two important contributions. First, it will offer theoretical knowledge to explain equity perceptions of negotiators in construction dispute negotiation. Second, the understanding of equity perceptions will help construction negotiators to execute a fair negotiation.

A Study of Construction Dispute Negotiation: Moderating Effects of Personality Traits on Behavior-outcome Relationships Negotiation is an indispensable part of dispute resolution. It has been recognized as the most cost-effective way to achieve consensual dispute resolutions in the construction industry. In the course of negotiation, personality traits of negotiators affect their behavior and thus the outcomes. As such this project is designed to study the inter-relationships amongst personality traits, negotiator behaviors, and negotiation outcomes. The findings of this project will underpin behavioral research of construction dispute negotiation.

A Phase Transition Model of Withdrawal in Construction Dispute Negotiation Resolving construction disputes through negotiation remains the most efficient method as formal proceedings like arbitration and litigation consume exorbitant resources. Even alternative dispute resolution techniques are largely negotiation assisted by a neural person. However, negotiation has little prospect of success if the disputants do not have the desire to continue – withdrawal.

Developing an Organizational Culture Inventory for Construction Organizations The construction industry has been criticized for being inefficient. There are many causes attributing to this, inter alia, confrontational contracting behavior, lack of innovation, indifferent to research and development efforts are some notable causes. Organizational culture has been identified as one of the essential factors that affect efficiency and productivity. This project aims to explore the theoretical construct of organizational culture, an inventory that can be used to evaluate the cultural orientation of construction organizations will be developed.

Analyzing Construction Contract Disputes: A Fault Tree Methodology Construction works are of high-value, long production duration and dispute prone. The complexity of the contractual web and the resulting contract disputes make the industry infamous for being litigious. The proliferation of construction contract disputes has indeed caused concern at a ministerial level in the Hong Kong Government. Several industry-wide reviews have therefore pointed to the need for cogent dispute management. Despite its topicality construction contract disputes (CCD) are seldom defined. This project aims to capitalize on the wealth of knowledge in this area and further our understanding by developing a conceptual framework to describe CCD, employing the well-established Fault Tree methodology. The Fault Tree methodology employs a ‘top-down’ or ‘backward’ approach to finding the causes of an undesired result. Treating a CCD as a system failure, a fault tree framework helps in organizing the contributors to a failure in a structure that depicts hierarchical order and logical links.

A Cusp Catastrophe Analysis of Contracting Behavior The construction industry has been infamous for being inefficient, litigious and wants of innovation. In terms of its approach to contracting, despite a paradigm shift from confrontation to cooperation having been advocated in almost every industry review report, contracting behavior remains largely adversarial. The last decade evidenced tremendous interest in advancing this paradigm shift. This is reflected by voluminous publications of case studies, success factors and legal analyses of cooperative contracting. While these have been instrumental in arousing a general awareness of the issue, there is a need to understand the fundamentals better. This study aims to develop a contracting behavior model framed within the well-developed cusp catastrophe model. In this regard, contracting behavior is dependent on two drivers in dichotomy; cooperation and aggression. Sudden changes in behavior can be expected should one driver intensify to a threshold. The cusp catastrophe model also predicts that in order to return to the previous state of behavior, a significant reduction in the magnitude of the activating drivers is needed. This suggests that once a contracting party chooses to adopt a confrontational attitude, great efforts are needed to instill cooperation.

Developing a Trust Model for Co-operative Contracting The construction industry has been criticized for its inefficiency, and a lack of co-operation has been identified as one of the major causes. The report “Construct for Excellence” published in January 2001 identified some critical problems in the industry and called for radical reforms. Among other suggestions, fostering a co-operative culture in project delivery was recommended as a means to improve the efficiency of the construction industry. A co-operatives culture is built on trust, and that trust cannot be cultivated without a good understanding of the underlying concepts. Hence, in order to advocate a co-operative culture there is an urgent need to develop a trust model for co-operative contracting.

The Effects of Contract Governance on Negotiating Behaviours The last two decades evidenced a surge of studies on construction dispute resolution. Most of these studies focus on the design of the resolution process, use of a neutral party to facilitate a settlement and the development of decision support systems to assist disputant. These suggest the reliance on systems rather than improving our understanding on the negotiation involved. In actual fact, even alternative disputes resolution techniques are assisted negotiation and the settlements reached are called Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement (BATNA). Review of literature suggests that negotiation outcome depends very much on the negotiating behaviours of the negotiators. In construction, the existence of a contract results in a set of contextual factors such as risk pattern, time pressure as well as power balance under which a dispute is to be negotiated. This project seeks to investigate the effects of contract governance on negotiating behaviours. The implications on negotiation outcome will also be examined.

Developing a Contingent Model of Construction Mediator Tactics The prevalence of an adversarial culture and a high degree of fragmentation are two major factors that cause disputes in the construction industry. Dispute is common in construction and often believed to be inevitable. The exorbitant cost and lengthy process of litigation and arbitration have led to an increasing use of Alternative Dispute Resolution techniques (ADR). Among the various ADR processes available, mediation is the most commonly used in Hong Kong. The difference between medication and negotiation is the use of a third party neutral in the mediation process. This project examined the relationships among dispute sources, mediator tactics and mediation outcomes. A contingent paradigm is proposed.

A Fuzzy Neural Network Model for Bid Evaluation Competitive bidding is a commonly used approach to award construction contracts. Selecting the lowest bid is particularly common in the case of public clients as they are accountable to the general public and have to demonstrate fairness. The bidding price is therefore the sole dimension used in bid evaluation, especially in private developments. The reliance on bidding price alone could be problematic, as it may bear no relationship to the capability of a bidder. Previous researchers have recommended the incorporation of non-price factors in bid evaluation. A neural network based performance prediction model was developed in collaboration with the Hong Kong Housing Authority. It was found that past performance is a reliable evaluator.

Effects of programmed relational techniques on construction contracting environment Construction projects are characterised by heavy information exchange and contracting parties are mutually dependent on each other. Confrontational attitude arises where the mutually dependent parties are having conflicting objectives. The inefficiency associated with such a confrontation attitude had long been recognised. Programmed relational techniques are defined as those mechanisms and arrangements, included in the contract, that seek to enhance a co-operative environment and to improve thee working relationship among the project participants. Through a case study, the techniques used to instil, foster and maintain partnering spirit within a project team were examined.

A Construction Neural Network (Construct NN) System Neural Networks have been successfully attempted to solve construction problems such as estimating construction costs and mark-up, predicting construction productivity, predicting settlements using tunnelling and predicting the outcome of construction litigation. Despite the undeniable advantages over traditional methods, neural networks also suffer a number of shortcomings, notably a lack of precision, limited theory to assist in their desig, not guarantee in finding an acceptable solution, a limited ability to rationalize the solutions provided. This project will address those weaknesses and develop a neural network system, named as Construct-NN, to meet the specific needs of construction prediction. Construct-NN can analyze the collected raw data and represent the data in the form suitable for prediction. The training method can search for the best network architecture and guarantees the best solution for a given construction problem. Construct-NN allows the user to validate the best solution for a give construction problem. Construct-NN allows the user to validate the model performance under deployed environment and to explain the confidence level of a predicted result. If necessary, Construct NN can re-train the model as more training data are available.

A Decision Model for Construction Dispute Resolution Design Construction professionals are no strangers to construction dispute. Skill in dispute resolution should be part of the tool kit of any practitioner in managerial capacity. Besides voluntary negotiation, the mechanism for resolving dispute is often governed by contract, hence designing disputes resolution system is an integral part of contract planning. The research project examined the critical design factors of an effective dispute resolution procedure.

Projects related to Enhancing teaching of contracts and quantity surveying

Developing an e-Platform for Teaching and Learning Construction Negotiation Negotiation is a basic skill and a persistent practice to all construction professionals. It is an indispensable part of the formation of collaborative agreements and settlement of disputes in the construction industry. This proposed project seeks to develop an e-Platform for construction negotiation that aims to equip students with basic negotiation and critical decision-making skills for construction negotiation through interactive exercises and assessment tools, as well as proactive learning tasks and materials. The skills acquired on e-Platform are expected to further strengthen students negotiation force and ability in their workplaces.

Developing a Web-based self-learning progrmme for the measurement of building works With ever increasing complexity, capital investments involving substantial monetary value demands a fair and transparent contract award system. Bills of Quantities have been used for more than a century as a control document that enables tender evaluation, valuation of interim payment and variations as well as project final account preparation. Measurement of works is one of the fundamental skills for the completion of Bills of Quantities and thus a critical part of curriculum for construction studies. Feedback from students suggested that the major barrier to command measurement skill is the inability to relate drawings with real objects. This is particularly so for those A-Level school leavers with no practical field exposures. The primary learning outcome of a measurement subject is the ability to measure building works in accordance with the Standard Methods of Measurement (SMM). The proposed project seeks to enhance the attainment of this intended outcome through the development of a web-based multi-media self-learning programme that maximizes the learning impact derived from visual display enabled by advanced multi-media technology.

Developing a web-based self-learning programme for the measurement of building services works The advance in multi-media technology offers new delivery opportunities for traditionally conducted courses. Measurement of building Services work is one of those. Measurement of building services work involves the applications of standard rules to non-standard system designs. This requires good knowledge in the principles of measurement rules as well as well developed skills in mastering variation of same. The main hurdle that students need to overcome is to visualize the information on the drawings. Therefore, the use of visual illustrations such as video and photos will greatly improve the learning outcome and Multi-media techniques can place a significant role to assist in the visualization process. Once this is achieved, the remaining task is to use text to describe the information. Furthermore, the accessibility of the Internet facilities a learning environment that allows student to acquire the skill in measurement at a pace suited to their level of proficiency. In addiction, Practice opportunities are no longer confined to thee scheduled teacher-student contact hours. The web-based self-learning programme covers the basic principles together with illustrations, worked examples and assessment exercises.

Developing a Web-Based Construction Contracts Resources Centre The objective of the project is to develop a web-based construction contracts resources centre for use by students taking construction contract courses offered by the BC Department. The proposed construction contracts resources centre shall be web-based and hence enable students to assess construction contracts information such as, local construction cases, standard forms of contract commonly used in Hong Kong, common contractual problems with suggested solutions and reference standard documentations, at their own pace and time. Through a suitably designed information system and searching mechanism, the students can assess to the wealth of the contracts information relevant to their areas of studies.

Developing a multi-media self-learning programme for the measurement of building works The use of multi-media technique facilitates a learning environment that allows students to get acquainted with the rules at a pace suited to their level of proficiency. Practice opportunities are no longer confined to the scheduled teacher-student contact hours. The proposed project seeks to develop a self-learning programme in the form of a series of VCDs covering the basic principles together with illustrations, worked examples and exercises.