Construction industry joint venture behaviour in Hong Kong―designed for collaborative results?

摘要

Large-scale construction infrastructure projects in Hong Kong (HK) have tended to be delivered using joint ventures (JVs) of global and local construction organisations. The main reason why individual, often very large, construction companies do so is to offer a customer focused service package that meets that customer's needs. Supporting reasons include bridging knowledge and expertise gaps, sharing risk and exploring opportunities to add value to the JV organisations through collaboration. Collaborative forms include partnerships, alliances and joint ventures. The Hong Kong infrastructure market is both highly competitive and collaborative. Results from a pilot study investigating the nature of the JV relationship are reported upon in this paper. This research focused upon the motivation of JV partners and the way they design their behavioural responses in project organisations to meet challenges and achieve their goals. Nine senior executives from JV organisations operating in this segment of the HK construction market were interviewed. The reported results explore the nature of JV partner motivation, the way in which organisational behaviours are designed to respond to the organisational and operations needs of the projects. This was an exploratory study and so results cannot be generalised, however, the value of this paper is that it provides insights from those at the most senior level of these nine organisations. These were gained through structured interviews each lasting over two hours.