Developing a Performance Measure for Networking in Construction Industry

摘要

Construction project is not similar to mass production in factory and its unique nature poses challenges to every professional involved in it. Involvement of different professionals for a single project causes multi-disciplinary effect which makes information exchange more complicated and such differentiation in roles leads to adversarial culture in the construction industry. Besides, the contractors sub-let their works to different subcontractors and suppliers in order to reduce the risk of uncertainty. Thus, the construction industry is always described as fragment due to the above characteristics and such fragmentation leads to poor project performance. Networking study is a research topic in the fields of sociology, anthropology, etc. to investigate the relationships among a group of people or organizations and examine the patterns and implications of these relationships. Studies conducted in the past decade have proposed that the effect of networking is positively related to the firm's performance and can be regarded as an effective tool for gaining competitive advantage. However, little research is conducted to investigate the performance measure about networking in construction. This paper aims to explore the possibility of measuring the performance of networking in the construction industry. The results seek to identify the characteristics and performance measure of networking and provide insight into the future construction research in the perspective of networking.