A correlational study of the relationship between organizational objectives alignment and North American construction project success

Difficulties implementing construction projects and failures in meeting expectations for cost, schedule, and quality are a problem with vast economic impact. The problem is that a lack of alignment between organization strategic objectives and project business objectives is a cause of the organizations’ construction project failure. The purpose of this quantitative, nonexperimental, correlational study was to examine the relationship between alignment of organization strategic objectives with project business objectives and construction project success for organizations with North American projects. To identify the relationship between the variable of alignment and the iron triangle model (ITM) variables, quantitative research was utilized. The alignment scores for participants for large-scale construction projects in North America were calculated using responses from the strategic alignment maturity model (SAMM) instrument. The construction project success data were calculated using the Project Success Model instrument based on the tenets of the ITM. The population for this study involved organizations using the services of the construction industry in North America. The sample size included six respondents representing six separate organizations. The design for this study was correlation. Regression was used to evaluate the relationships between the variables of the study, and a test for statistical significance was executed. The F test performed for each of the project success variables indicated that all three cases failed to reject the null hypothesis. The results of the Spearman-rho test indicated a very low degree of association between alignment of organization strategic objectives and project business objectives as related to the construction project success variables identified in the ITM. The findings of this study do not support alignment as being a predictor of project success using the ITM variables as outcome variables for success. A practical application for the findings of this study may be to place focus on alignment during the selection of projects and the planning phase and to focus on improving project management performance, including processes, communication, and training. Recommendations for future studies include broadening the research with a larger sample size and studying the relationship between individual alignment characteristics measured by the SAMM and the ITM variables.