Relationship Embeddedness in Construction Project Teams: The Effect of Social Behaviors on Relational Behaviors

Abstract

Relational and social behaviors of construction project team members explain relationship embeddedness. The literature review revealed three social behaviors (i.e., past experience, benevolence, and integrity) and seven relational behaviors (i.e., harmonization of conflict, propriety of means, restraint of power, reliance and expectation, contractual solidarity, flexibility, and reciprocity) commonly exhibited by construction project team members. Through a binomial logistic regression, research findings revealed that past experience was a significant (p < 0.01) predictor for five of the seven relational behaviors while benevolence and integrity were each significant (p < 0.01) predictors for three of the seven relational behaviors. Overall, out of the seven relational behaviors, only propriety of means is predicted by all the three social behaviors. Through internal validation, the prediction models performed well based on both positive predictive values and negative predictive values. From a relationship management standpoint, this research introduces relational and social behaviors of team members as triggers of relationship embeddedness. The results contribute to understanding the effect of social behaviors on the relational behaviors found in construction project teams where eleven statistically significant models that predict relational behaviors using the social behaviors were validated. The implication of this is that construction industry practitioners can use these prediction models to predict relationship interdependencies of team members.