Exploring the Role of the Team Environment in Building Project Performance

Design and construction projects incorporate stakeholders from many different organizations, often with conflicting goals, overlapping responsibilities and differing areas of expertise. With an increasing interest in improving the integration and collaboration on construction projects, there is a need for empirical research to understand the contributions of project team interactions to project-level performance. The purpose of this paper is to explore the correlations among several indicators of the collaborative team environment and traditional measures of project success. With the assistance of an industry advisory board, a survey questionnaire was developed to collect detailed information for recently completed building projects in the United States. The questionnaire was distributed via mailing lists, conferences, and industry contacts to reach a diverse set of respondents. Using this large data set of 124 projects, bivariate Spearman rho correlation coefficients are calculated and reported. Significant correlations suggest the role of on-time communication in reducing construction cost growth, higher team chemistry in reducing overall schedule growth, and larger administrative burdens in increasing construction cost growth and final unit cost. Multicollinearity among the measures of team environment suggests the presence of latent variables and the need for future multivariate analyses.