Revisiting the Relationship Between Contract Governance and Contractors’ Opportunistic Behavior in Construction Projects

Journal article


Wang, Y., Chen, Y., Wang, W., Chen, Y. and Jin, M. (2019). Revisiting the Relationship Between Contract Governance and Contractors’ Opportunistic Behavior in Construction Projects. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. https://doi.org/10.1109/tem.2019.2945551
AuthorsWang, Y., Chen, Y., Wang, W., Chen, Y. and Jin, M.
Abstract

Contracts are crucial for curbing opportunism, a common phenomenon in construction projects. This article differentiates among the contractual mechanisms of obligatoriness, monitoring, and coordination, and studies the relationships between the complexity of the above functions and different types of opportunistic behavior. Using data from 262 clients (i.e., the parties issuing contracts) in the Chinese construction industry, this article reveals that contractual obligatoriness has a negative effect on strong-form opportunistic behavior. At the same time, contractual monitoring and coordination have positive and negative effects, respectively, on weak-form opportunistic behavior. Furthermore, we find that goodwill trust mediates contractual coordination's effect on weak-form opportunistic behavior. This article contributes to both the contract management literature and the interorganizational relationship governance literature by providing more nuanced findings that speak to the debate surrounding the relationship between contractual governance and opportunistic behavior, elaborate the mediation mechanism, and provide insights into the contractual function view.

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works

Year2019
JournalIEEE Transactions on Engineering Management
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
ISSN0018-9391
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.1109/tem.2019.2945551
Web address (URL)https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8876659
Publication dates
Online18 Oct 2019
Publication process dates
Accepted18 Sep 2019
Deposited10 Mar 2020
Accepted author manuscript
License
All rights reserved
File Access Level
Open
Page range1-13
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https://openresearch.lsbu.ac.uk/item/8947q

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