Behavioural assessments in construction procurement: A bandwagon of institutional waste?

The continually evolving drive to create integrated and collaborative project teams from a supply chain of disparate organizations has seen the behavioural assessment of suppliers become increasingly common in construction procurement exercises. Within the stated objectives of this are the desire of procuring authorities to select supply partners with the right 'collaborative working capabilities' and 'cultural alignment'. Suppliers having the 'right behaviours' are seen as critical to project success. The belief in the benefits of behavioural assessments in procurement has become so prevalent as to be referenced in the Infrastructure Client Group’s 'Alliancing Code of Practice' published by HM Treasury in 2015. However, the spread of this resource intensive practice has occurred in the absence of any published evidence that it increases the effectiveness of procurement objectives, and without reference to the extensive scientific literature on the efficacy of behavioural assessment in the context of performance prediction. This paper critically evaluates the efficacy and value of behavioural assessment practices commonly used in UK infrastructure procurement exercises. In doing so we use extensive evidence from the field of social science to address ARCOM’s 2018 central theme, 'Balancing fragmentation and integration'. Importantly, the paper addresses the use of methods attempting to secure integration but which evidence suggests generate actual and potential waste. The paper draws on social science and construction management literature and contributes to knowledge in three different ways: (1) raising awareness of the extensive social science research on behavioural assessment, and its implications for the application of such assessment in procurement; (2) providing a novel platform that can be used to assess the efficacy of such assessment, including each of its component parts; and finally by (3) adding to the turn towards engaging psychological science as a basis for improving construction management practice by reducing 'institutional waste'.