Interplay of relational governance, task conflict, opportunism and their effect on the performance of projects.

Abstract

Practitioners and academics have been perplexed over the years by low efficiency and bad performance in construction projects. Several critical factors have been uncovered by previous studies which are governance mechanism, task conflict and opportunism. But an obvious question arises how the mechanism of governance in the presence of conflict can mitigate opportunism. The overarching objective of this study is therefore to create a model to study the effectiveness of these mechanisms of governance in the presence of task conflict. This paper is based on a positivist study philosophy in which a quantitative deductive method was used to collect data from 139 participants. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) through SmartPLS3.The research findings show that relational governance affects project efficiency considerably and is helpful in decreasing opportunism and conflict. In addition, there is proof that opportunistic behavior will increase the task conflict among parties but both task conflict and opportunism doesn’t have direct impact on the performance of project