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The perception that the repetitive nature and attributes of mass housing projects (MHPs) induce significant influence on communication among projects teams have persistently been acknowledged without an empirical accentuation. This seemingly untested knowledge tends to limit the predictive accuracy of success and effectiveness of adopted communication style, strategies and models in mass housing particularly due to the incidence of the repetitive attributes. The purpose of this study is to delineate the influence of the repetitive attributes of mass housing projects on communication performance among the project team.

Through the use of questionnaire survey and structural equation modelling analysis, a hypothesized model tested evaluated the effects of the repetitive attributes of mass housing on information flow and information composition communication performance.

In the case of influence on information flow, it was seen to be substantial whereas that of the information composition was moderate.

The findings offer empirical credence to the existing perception and indeed affirm that the repetitive features of MHPs significantly contribute to communication performance related to information flow and information composition among the project team. The implication of these findings is that, practitioners and stakeholders on mass housing are urged to explore bespoke communication methods, medium, strategies and management approaches that fit the MHP attributes and environment to engender managerial and communication efficiencies in the delivery.

As public–private partnerships (PPPs) have become preferred and veritable approach to deliver affordable housing, the seemingly lack of understanding of the significant factors that impact on success has become a notable setback. This study aims to delineate significant factors that can support decisions in affordable PPP public housing delivery.

Largely, a questionnaire survey was adopted to elicit insights from practitioners, policymakers and experts to develop an evaluative decision support model using an analytical hierarchy process and multi-attribute utility technique approach. Further, an expert illustration was conducted to evaluate and validate the results on the housing typologies.

The results revealed that energy efficiency and low-cost green building materials scored the highest weighting of all the criteria. Furthermore, multi-storey self-contained flats were found to be the most preferred housing typology and were significantly influenced by these factors. From the model evaluation, the scores on the factors of sustainability, affordability, cultural values and accountability were consistent across all typologies of housing whereas that of benchmarking, governance and transparency were varied.

The decision support factors captured varied dimensions of key factors that impact on affordable PPP housing that have not been considered in an integrated manner. These findings offer objective and systematic support to decision-making in affordable PPP housing delivery.

Communication ineffectiveness inherent in the unique attributes of Mass Housing Project (MHP) features is well admitted in the body of literature. However, the understanding of the extent and nature of this influence of the unique features of MHPs requires an empirical insight. The aim of this paper is to identify the communication ineffectiveness induced by the unique features and delineate the implications of the findings for mass housing practitioners and stakeholders towards engendering effective communication performance.

Through a structured questionnaire survey, data were elicited from mass housing stakeholders and project team leaders. The data were subsequently analysed using structural equation modelling, and the communication effectiveness evaluation model was developed. Subsequently, the model was validated through a questionnaire survey on ten experienced mass housing practitioners, researchers and stakeholders.

The results revealed significant, moderate and weak effects of the unique features of MHP team communication performance. This suggests that the unique features of MHPs have varying degree of influence on the communication performance among project teams’ delivery. The findings provide practical, empirical insights and understanding into the inherent communication ineffectiveness on MHPs, and thus are very useful in communication management and planning in MHP’s delivery.

Against the backdrop of the need to gain an in-depth understanding of the inherent communication challenges towards improving communication performance in MHP delivery, the findings have rigorously revealed and provided clear insight into the nature of communication ineffectiveness inherent in the unique features of MHPs. The findings and insights provided by this study are thus useful for aligning communication management planning and strategies to the unique MHP environment to engender communication success. Practitioners can also use these findings towards the development of their communication behavioural skills and communication infrastructure for MHP delivery.

Inefficiencies in public-private partnership (PPP) has been attributed to deficient and poor governance practices and structures. It has been recognized that a veritable way to achieve efficiency in PPP governance is through gaining an understanding of the theoretical, practical and contextual factors that underline governance practices in PPP project delivery. The purpose of this study is to explore the significant governance factors in PPP project performance and delivery.

Using a questionnaire survey on major players in PPPs in policy, research, consultancy and professionals, the study sought to delineate the significant governance factors that impact PPP project delivery performance.

A step-wise multiple regression analysis revealed effective communication and openness in sharing project information systems, competent, responsible and effective project leadership, trust-building processes, systems and practices, best practice organizational and team norms, team culture, cohesion practices, effective relationship management practices, robust policy diffusion and transfer processes, friendly business environment and government support and contractual and renegotiation flexibility as the key contractual and non-contractual governance factors that can predict about 79% level of PPP project delivery performance.

The findings offer support to improve PPP delivery in governance.

These findings are, thus, useful toward evolving regulatory quality governance mechanisms, flexible supervision and quality decisions that can enhance value for money in PPP projects in PPP project delivery.

The South African Construction Industry (SACI) in recent times has been characterized by a strong emphasis towards achieving sustainable building practices in infrastructural delivery. However, the lack of progress encountered in making gains in achieving sustainable practices has raised concerns over the effectiveness and understanding of the extent to which life cycle assessment (LCA) techniques may aid in meeting requirements of sustainable construction. Most efforts at LCA have been blighted with numerous barriers that have not been rigorously pursued and aggregated. Ironically, there is a lack of knowledge and understanding of the limitations and barriers to these methodologies, especially in the South African context. The purpose of this study is to delineate the cluster of barriers to the adoption of LCA methodologies in the SACI.

A questionnaire survey was carried out from a deductive research design elicit primary data based on the experience of purposively sampled stakeholders in LCA in the SACI on the extent they perceived the presence of well-established barriers in LCA adoption culled from the extensive literature review.

Through the use of factor analysis, three aggregated clusters of key barriers to LCA adoption in the SACI were identified, which were knowledge and enabling conditions constraints, cost and time constraints and technical constraints. The results confirm that indeed human and technical barriers have been notable in limiting gains in LCA adoption and achieving sustainable practices.

These findings are, thus, useful in overcoming challenges to LCA methodologies in achieving sustainable building practices in building and infrastructural delivery in SACI.

The adaptive performance of architects as a key professional in project delivery teams has become important for developing strategies, skills and cognitive behaviours for sustainability of working systems. However, the understanding and knowledge of adaptive performance of architects is lacking in the current literature. Thus, this study fills this gap by primarily assessing the adaptive performance of architects in project teams in project delivery.

By adopting the widely used eight-dimension attributes of adaptive performance, a questionnaire survey was conducted among team participants and stakeholders who directly or indirectly work on projects with architects in the public and private sectors project delivery supply chain in Ghana. A total of 42 responses were subsequently used in a fuzzy set theory analysis being facilitated by a set of linguistic terms.

From the assessment, the overall adaptive performance of architects from the eight-dimension attributes emerged to be fairly high. Additionally, the architects’ performance in the individual eight-dimensions showed varied results. High performance was registered in architects’ ability to handling work stress and cultural adaptability. Also, architects demonstrated a fairly high performance in dealing with uncertain or unpredictable work situations. However, in the cases of learning work tasks, technologies and procedures, interpersonal adaptability and handling crisis and emergency situations, architects were deemed to have low and fairly low adaptive performance among project teams.

Given the vagueness and complexities in understanding adaptability among teams and its assessment, through the use of fuzzy set theory based on a suitable set of linguistics terms, the study presents a novel understanding of the level of architects’ adaptive performance in project teams in project delivery. The findings are extremely useful in helping architects adapt and cope with changing competitive work environment by developing the right cognitive behaviours for task functions and organizational roles, disruptions and aiding their ability to self-regulate.

The need to gain theoretical and practical understanding into the communication performance challenges in public private partnership (PPP) projects is considered as a precursor to effective communication strategies, management, planning and improvement in PPP models in both developed and developing countries. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the nature of communication performance challenges in PPP projects.

By adopting a deductive research design, a questionnaire survey of participants in the communication network of PPP projects in two countries (Ghana and South Africa) was conducted. The responses were analyzed using mean scores, Kendall’s concordance and Mann–Whitney U test.

The results revealed communication performance challenges that are unique to PPP project environment. Additionally, there were other typologies of communication challenges such as untimeliness, distortions and protocols that were frequently experienced in Ghana and not in South Africa. Also the emergence of misunderstanding affirmed that indeed this is a communication problem that is common and not peculiar to any project context or country.

With communication challenges and information asymmetries as notable challenges in PPP coupled with suggestions that effective communication is central to success of PPP projects and management, the insight into the communication performance challenges given by this study could be very useful to effective planning and strategies towards communication in construction project delivery in PPP and thus underline the importance of deriving mechanisms and protocols that suit PPP project environments.

These findings can be a precursor for developing bespoke communication systems, tools, protocols and communication behaviours to facilitate information flow aimed at overcoming information asymmetries and ultimately improving the quality of communication actions, tasks and outcomes in PPP project delivery.

Non-traditional procurement is thought to offer enhanced benefits over traditional contracts. However, several factors significantly impacting the optimization of the benefits have been suggested. Even though effective communication is ranked high among these factors, not enough empirical insights have been given to the nature of communication performance in non-traditional procurements in construction project delivery. The purpose of this paper is to focus on understanding the taxonomy of communication performance in non-traditional procurements in the South African Construction Industry, given the centrality of communication to team effectiveness, performance, project success and managerial efficiency.

Adopting a deductive research approach, an empirical questionnaire survey was conducted drawing on the practical communication experience of project teams engaged in projects using non-traditional procurement systems.

Using aggregated mean scores and inter-rater agreement index and Mann‒Whitney tests, the results revealed inaccuracies, barriers and procedural challenges as frequently occurring in the interpersonal and organizational communication in the adopted non-traditional procurement systems. Additionally, untimeliness and distorted information were noted to be occurring occasionally, whereas incomplete communication, misunderstood information and gatekeeping rarely occurred. Lastly, protocol-related communication challenges were deemed to have never occurred in their interpersonal and organizational communication in their project delivery. In the assessment of communication performance, the less frequently occurring assessment indicator is a testament to good communication performance, whereas the frequently occurring indicator represents a poor performance in the communication.

This systematic approach toward understanding the taxonomy of the interpersonal and organizational communication performance in non-traditional procurement is very significant toward communication performance improvement in the industry. The insight given by the findings may help construction project practitioners to focus their attention on the necessary aspects of communication in non-traditional procurements to optimize their benefits over traditional procurement models.

Though affective commitment has been thought to be critical in team selection, it is yet to be integrated into current models on team selection primarily due to lack of understanding of its contribution to teamwork effectiveness and performance. This study tests the contribution of complementary person team-fit (CF), supplementary person team-fit (SF) and affective commitment (AC) to teamwork effectiveness in construction project teams. By this examination, a theoretical case is made for the inclusion of affective commitment in team selection and deployment in construction project delivery.

By using a deductive questionnaire survey on project team participants and experienced human resource managers in recruitment and team selection in project organizations, structural equation model (SEM) was used to test the contribution of CF, SF and AC parameters to teamwork effectiveness from a total of 105 responses gathered from project team participants in project delivery.

The SEM revealed that, CF, SF and AC together account for about 81% predictive effect to teamwork effectiveness which is higher than joint effect of CF and SF in existing models in team selection and deployment. By this, it can be affirmed that, in considering CF, SF and AC in an integrated manner in team selection and deployment, higher team effectiveness can be achieved that can stimulate high performing teams and effectiveness in project delivery.

The findings give theoretical assertiveness to extending consideration of competence and values in team selection to embrace affections and commitment to engender effectiveness in teamwork, cohesion, collaboration and performance. This present novel attempts to include affective commitment in teamwork toward higher team effectiveness.

The link between relationship typologies and effectiveness of conflict resolution approaches remains to be tested despite its significance in conflict management in construction project delivery. By using the four relationships attributes based on the group attachment theory, the purpose of the study was to explore the cluster of relationships among project teams and organisations and the performance of conflict management strategies across these clusters in the Ghanaian construction industry.

Using a deductive questionnaire survey in the Ghanaian construction industry, a total of 137 responses were gathered and analyzed using cluster analysis, mean scores and ANOVA to reveal the relationship clusters and performance of conflict management strategies across these clusters.

The results revealed eight relationship clusters that exist among project teams and organisations with distinct influence of roles & tasks function, cognition, emotions and behavior attributes across the relationship clusters. In the aspect of the effectiveness of conflict management strategies, it was noted that the performance of these strategies were significantly different across the groups. For instance, integrating as a conflict management strategy was deemed to be effective in resolving conflict in unitary, adversarial, pluralist, mutuality, collaborative and partnering relationship clusters. In the case of coopetitive and coercive relationships, the performance of integrating as a conflict management strategy was less effective. This study thus has empirically proved that, different relationship clusters of teams and organizations exist within the Ghanaian construction industry, and that they perform different roles & tasks functions, cognition, emotions and behavioural attributes in their formation. Additionally, the performance effectiveness of conflict management strategies differed across the relationship clusters.

By aligning the relationship attributes to the dynamics of relationship clusters experienced in project teams and organisations, relationship quality, suitability and effectiveness of conflict management strategies can be optimized. The findings can inform project teams and stakeholders to develop fit-for-purpose relationship attributes among teams and organisations to enhance team effectiveness, relationship quality and conflict management in the industry.