Relationship-quality judgment model for construction project procurement: A conjoint measurement

Relationship quality as a measure of working relationships in construction has been associated with four general attributes of trust, commitment, teamwork, and performance satisfaction. These attributes have been previously explored and identified within New Zealand construction sector. However, much ambiguity remains as to what are the values or preference of parties involved in construction project procurement and how the attributes are traded-off in real decision making processes. Basically how do the industry practitioners judge their relationship quality based on the four mentioned attributes. Data is collected from New Zealand industry practitioners through a conjoint full profile questionnaire technique. Via conjoint and cluster analysis a judgment model for relationship quality is extracted. The overall aggregate conjoint analysis suggests that performance satisfaction is the most important attribute in judging relationship quality in construction activities. The other three attributes also attained a relatively large importance index inferring that all are valuable attributes and contributing to relationship quality. However, by assessing the conjoint measurements and utilities generated at individual level and applying hierarchical cluster analysis different clusters of practitioners with distinct patterns of judgment are identified. The largest cluster had performance satisfaction as their main decisive attribute followed by commitment and teamwork. Conversely the second cluster had trust and teamwork as the decisive attribute with performance satisfaction as the least important and finally the smallest cluster regarded trust and performance to be more decisive. Hence, judgment criteria for relationship quality in construction procurement are not unanimous and diverse perceptions exist as to what is relationship quality; with different managerial implications.