Journal of Management in Engineering

Previous studies consistently label the Materials and Resources (MR) credit category of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) as the least attainable, despite its critical role in transitioning to a circular economy (CE). To this end, a long-standing gap exists in understanding the MR credit achievement, especially in LEED v4, which has been in use for nearly over a decade. This paper evaluates the level of CE integration in LEED v4 across 971 US-based certified projects. The study comprehensively analyzed the projects achievement patterns of the five MR credits: Building Life Cycle Impact Reduction (C1), Environmental Product Declarations (C2), Sourcing of Raw Materials (C3), Sourcing of Material Ingredients (C4), and Construction and Demolition Waste Management (C5). Results revealed that the most prevalent point achievement pattern was 0-1-0-1-2 out of a maximum of 5-2-2-2-2 for C1, C2, C3, C4, and C5. C1 and C3 posed significant challenges, with 588 and 601 projects receiving zero points, respectively. Additionally, the study statistically investigated differences in achievement across project groups of different certification levels, space use, and floorspace categories. Findings are further validated through interviews with LEED experts, who emphasized challenges such as additional costs, inadequate project specifications, and delays in engaging LEED professionals. Results align the status of LEED projects with the lower impact end of the reduce, reuse, recycle framework of CE, which is limited to waste management approaches. Research implications stress the need for collaborative efforts across the industry, owners, and policymakers to enhance CE practices within LEED projects. Ultimately, this study advocates for incentivizing building reuse, the integration of optimized life cycle assessments, as well as enhancing material data availability and transparency.

Abstract

Project managers (PMs) who are middle-level leaders at the project level report to superiors in the headquarters who are top-level leaders. Other studies have focused on how PMs as middle-level managers lead teams at the operating level, with scant emphasis on the dynamics between the top-level leader and PMs. This research investigates the effective organizational behaviors that companies and top-level leaders adopt when managing PMs so that they achieve good job outcomes. A mixed-methods research design comprising survey with PMs and interviews with top-level leaders was employed. Data were collected via an online survey using a structured questionnaire and in-depth interviews via video calls. It was found that top-level leaders adopt a mix of custodial, collegial, and supportive organizational behaviors when managing PMs. However, the study found that the custodial organizational model, which depends on monetary benefits and economic resources and is frequently used, is associated with increased absenteeism rates among PMs and not associated with positive job outcomes. The study reveals a significant finding: adopting both supportive and collegial management models correlates strongly with increased job satisfaction, salary contentment, and internal work motivation among PMs. The contribution to knowledge is highlighting that a combined approach to organizational behavior yields excellent job outcomes for PMs, emphasizing the need for a balanced and nuanced approach. The study’s practical contribution lies in the actionable recommendations offered to top-level managers for effectively managing PMs.

Practical Applications

These findings have practical applications for strategic management in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) organizations. To effectively manage PMs, organizations and top-level leaders should empower PMs by providing them with the resources necessary to take ownership of their projects. Top-leaders must clearly define the roles and authority of PMs, ensuring they understand the organization’s strategic direction and its impact on project objectives. For decisions that are not high-stakes, PMs should be allowed to make choices independently, with the top-level leader offering supportive leadership. When it comes to decisions with significant risk, a collegial leadership is recommended, where top-level leaders and PMs collaborate to share the decision-making process. However, for highly uncertain decisions, top-level leaders should make the decisions themselves. Routine problem-solving should be managed by PMs using available resources, but top-level leaders should address critical problems. To promote a collegial culture, leaders should prioritize identifying solutions over assigning blame. Finally, organizations should establish performance-based incentives to reward PMs for their achievements. Recognition of PMs’ performance should go beyond monetary rewards and include public acknowledgment and opportunities for special assignments.

Various factors restrict the forward movement of blockchain technology (BT) in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. These factors frequently interact and change over time. Thus, conducting continual research and recognizing the crucial factors to establish focused policies and strategies for progress are essential. To tackle this issue, this paper puts forward a theoretical research model of the system dynamics of BT development in the AEC industry from a dynamic research perspective. This research model incorporates the technology–organization–environment framework and the technology acceptance model. The research results show that the development trend of BT within the AEC industry follows an overall S-shape. To varying degrees, the key influencing factors at the technological, organizational, and environmental levels can promote the development of BT. Furthermore, the paper analyzes promotion strategies for the key influencing factors at these three levels. We found that promoting organizational drive significantly impacted improving the effect of BT development. For instance, promoting organizational drive twice could improve the effect by 6.85%. On the other hand, promoting technological factors had a lesser effect; doubling that promotion resulted in an improvement of only 4.53%. Additionally, in the initial phases of BT development, its maturity, compatibility, and adoption cost play a more pronounced effect in determining the level of its development. The research findings aim to enable analyzing the key factors that influence AEC industry development by leveraging BT. This analysis provides the government with the necessary information to create policies that relate to BT. It also shows how adopting this technology can help businesses to reduce costs and improve efficiency.

The so-called strength of weak ties (SWT) theory asserts that weak relationships are more instrumental than strong ones in job searching and sharing. Yet, some posit the opposite: job opportunities tend to be shared through strong ties in some business areas. Nevertheless, little empirical research has been conducted to substantiate the hypotheses and unravel the rationales behind them. This paper attempts to contribute empirical evidence to this management field by focusing on the construction waste hauling business in Hong Kong. Four null hypotheses about the relationships between haulers’ tie strength and job opportunity sharing (defined as waste hauling order sharing) are proposed, and then a big data set containing 11.7 million waste hauling records is analyzed to test the hypotheses. The analysis shows that, in general, the stronger the tie strength of two haulers, the higher the quantity of job opportunities they share. Among all ties a hauler owns, the greater the proportion of strong ties, the higher the quantity and quality (e.g., shorter distance and less underloading) of job opportunities will be shared. However, these positive effects will be diminished when the strength or proportion exceeds a certain point. These empirical findings not only highlight the strength of strong ties, providing an empirical supplement for the long-standing SWT theory, but also exemplify an exploration of applying SWT theory in the construction management field. Moreover, this study provides practical implications for construction waste hauling businesses to improve efficiency and the public sector to pursue social optimality in construction waste management.

The significance of accident prevention in the construction industry has been consistently emphasized. Despite the research into various preventive methodologies, their application in actual construction sites still needs to be improved. Therefore, it is necessary to develop accident prevention methodologies and make improvements so that practitioners can utilize them in actual construction sites. This study sets out to propose methods for accident prevention using construction accident data and to develop a system that construction practitioners can easily utilize. Firstly, a methodology was developed to assess the risk of construction sites by considering site-specific characteristics through actual construction accident data. This led to the identification of five principal risk factors (i.e., construction type, facility type, ordering organization, construction cost, and safety management plan), and the results of risk assessment for different site classifications were derived by combining these factors. Then, machine-learning models were developed to predict accident-causing objects, accident types, and injury-death using four algorithms: random forest, light gradient boosting model, eXtreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), and categorical boosting. As a result, XGBoost demonstrated the most outstanding predictive performance, with averaged F1 scores of 0.839, 0.749, and 0.977, respectively. A web-based prototype was also developed to deploy the proposed methods, confirming the practical utility of the accident prevention strategies outlined in this research. These findings have the potential to improve the efficacy of site management by enabling proactive identification of high-risk areas, thereby promoting more effective accident prevention initiatives.

Safety participation of construction workers, as a manifestation of organizational citizenship behaviors, is essential for overall workplace safety. Workers’ safety participation may be influenced by both organizational and individual factors. For example, facing unfavorable organizational conditions such as job insecurity may restrain construction workers from safety participation, and individual capacity differs the preference for safety participation among workers. Moreover, the nature of their job is often stressful, which complicates the mechanisms through which safety participation is influenced. The current study set to examine the key barriers to safety participation of construction workers in project organizations and reveal the intermediate effect of stress and empathy on the influential mechanism. The empirical study collected over 500 sets of data from construction workers through a questionnaire survey. After reliability and validity tests, structural equation modeling (SEM) and multiple regression were applied to examine the interactions among organizational factors, stress, empathy, and safety participation. Findings of current study confirmed that (1) safety participation of construction workers was restrained due to emotional stress and emotional exhaustion; (2) the negative influence of several organizational factors on safety participation of workers were mediated by stress, namely, quantitative job insecurity–safety participation interactions mediated by emotional stress and both qualitative job insecurity–safety participation interactions and interpersonal conflict–safety participation interactions mediated by emotional stress and emotional exhaustion; and (3) the buffering effect of empathy on stress and safety participation was interestingly not confirmed by this study. Practical recommendations were proposed to manage occupational stress and address barriers to safety participation. This paper contributes to safety management in project organizations by highlighting the interplay among organizational, individual, and psychological factors and their impacts on safety participation from a stress perspective. Findings of the current study provide valuable insights to promote safety participations of workers in practices.

The challenge of implementing industrialized construction to achieve sustainable future-proof healthcare facilities is not only about construction methods themselves but also about how to shift design methodologies. COVID-19 has raised the attention of research and practices in using modular design and construction for healthcare facilities. However, the lifespan and functional differences between general and emergency healthcare facilities mean that their sustainable design requirements are not exactly the same. Drawing from 27 interviews and design review sessions with 19 international groups of experts, this research proposes a modular adaptable hospital design (MAHD) approach based on the Open Building Concept (OBC). This includes an evaluation framework composed of five design categories and 23 subcategories complemented with a set of design guidelines and it concludes by identifying a future implementation pathway. This research extends the implementation of OBC through theoretical contributions for modular and adaptable designs and practical guidelines for future design implementation.

Abstract

Healthcare infrastructure (HI) is essential for ensuring access to quality medical services, controlling diseases, and enhancing human health and the overall livability of cities. As public health emergencies such as COVID-19 pose considerable challenges, effectively assessing and enhancing the resilience of HI operations has become imperative. Notably, public health emergencies exhibit significant spatial and temporal variability, and HI is a complex system comprising multiple units with various interactions such as geographic relationships and social cooperation, which need to be carefully considered in resilience assessment. This study proposes an integrated framework for dynamic resilience assessment of HI operations, considering spatiotemporal characteristics of emergencies and multiple interrelations among healthcare facilities. First, an improved susceptible-exposed-infectious-removed-hospitalized-Fangcang-dead model was developed to simulate various scenarios across different epidemic phases, given the spatial heterogeneity in outbreak locations and temporal variability in transmission capacity. Furthermore, considering the multiple interrelations among hospitals, the complex HI network was constructed by integrating geographic locations and social cooperation. Finally, under various outbreak scenarios, the cascading failure process of HI was accurately simulated to dynamically assess resilience during different time periods of the epidemic. The proposed method was applied to assess the resilience of HI operations during the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan, China, demonstrating its effectiveness and applicability. It was found that 38% of the hospitals in the entire HI system experienced failure during the initiation phase of the epidemic, and this percentage rose to 78% during the acceleration phase. Moreover, HI’s operational resilience presented obvious variations among different outbreak scenarios. Dynamic resilience assessment under various epidemic scenarios can inform the development of targeted optimization strategies for improving HI’s operational resilience, encompassing pre-emergency prevention, during-emergency response, and postemergency restoration. Our study provides valuable insights into enhancing HI’s operational resilience, which has obvious strengths in supporting the optimization of management strategies during public health emergencies.

Practical Applications

Healthcare infrastructure (HI) plays a vital role in crisis response for the prevention and control of epidemics. Accurately assessing and improving the operational resilience to public health emergencies is crucial for maintaining the reliable services they provide. This study proposes an integrated framework for dynamic resilience assessment of HI operations, carefully considering both the spatiotemporal characteristics of emergencies and the multiple interrelations among healthcare facilities. Based on dynamic assessment of HI’s operational resilience under various epidemic scenarios, targeted optimization and management strategies can be developed for resilience improvement throughout the entire process, regarding pre-emergency prevention, during-emergency response, and postemergency restoration. The proposed framework offers a fine-grained assessment of the dynamic evolution of HI’s operational resilience and emphasizes the critical role of infrastructure network construction and emergency scenario setting in resilience planning and risk management. This study provides valuable guidance for creating optimal system configuration and emergency response strategies that can be implemented to foster the resilience of HI.