Enabling Team Resilience Against Calamities Through Sensemaking in Global Construction Engineering Projects

Abstract

The work teams in global construction engineering projects (GCEPs) tend to face various natural and man-made calamities that can catastrophically influence their performance; thus, enabling team resilience becomes vital. The literature shows noteworthy evidence identifying collective sensemaking as a key enabler to achieving team resilience, but this has still not been empirically confirmed and creates a knowledge gap. The global construction organizations also argue whether these teams actually need collective sensemaking for this purpose since team members will not have face-to-face interactions during times of calamities as they reside in different countries and work via virtual mode. With the results of a questionnaire survey among 52 GCEP teams, this paper concludes the positive and significant relationship between collective sensemaking and team resilience, confirming that the teams need collective sensemaking to become resilient. This finding makes an original contribution to the theory and practice in the GCEP sector and highlights the importance of much-needed attention from these teams to create collective sensemaking to become resilient against calamities. A recommendation is made for revealing practical ways of achieving this in a future study.