Causes Of Conflicts Of A Construction Industry : A Communicational Approach Essay

What is conflict? Even something as basic as a universal definition for the word conflict seems to vary from source to source. A literature review focusing on conflict defined it as “the interaction of interdependent people who perceive incompatibility and the possibility of interference from others as a result of this incompatibility” (Brinkert 2010). Often times the disagreement results not from a concrete difference, but rather a difference in perception (Ellis & Abbott 2012). One of the most important factors effecting conflict management is the resolution style used. The most often used tool for classifying how conflict is managed is the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (Iglesias & Vallejo 2012).

Conflict is generally defined by four criteria: expressed tension, interdependence, perceived incompatible goals, and the need for resolution (Wood,

Conflict is “an expressed struggle between at least two interdependent parties who perceive incompatible goals, scarce resources, and interference from others in achieving their goals” (Hocker, 1991). There are two basic types of conflicts: substantive and emotional. According to Schermerhorn et.al., substantive conflict is a fundamental disagreement over ends or goals to be pursued and the means for their

In construction projects, mostly the firms (in this case the firms become client) do not have the skills or develop skills inside the firms to undertake the projects due to amount of the projects should be conducted or the complexity of the projects (Reve and Levitt, 1984). Therefore, the economic decision to conduct the projects is to procure them to third parties. However, more commonly the client agonize the final quality of the projects will meet standard requirements. Thus, impacts to involvement of complex contracts of construction procurement.

The text book describes conflict as “a process that begins when one party perceives another party has or is about to negatively affect something the first party cares about.” There are different views on dealing with conflict. There is the traditional view that seeks to eliminate any conflict and the interaction group that seek to use conflict as a stepping stone to greater things. Conflict can arise in any situation and, following the managed conflict view, it is not necessarily something to be push under the table but something to

The five antecedents of conflict are the “overlapping or unclear job boundaries, inadequate communication, unreasonable or unclear policies standards or rules, unreasonable deadlines or extreme time pressure, and competition for limited resources” (Kinicki A. Kreitner R.2008 p. 277).

Conflict is defined as the behaviour due to which people differ in their feelings, thought and/or actions. Collins (1995) states that the conflict is a ‘serious disagreement and argument about something important’ and also as ‘a serious difference between two or more beliefs, ideas or interests’ (cf. Kumaraswamy, 1997, p. 96). In general it is believed that conflicts are the underlying cause of disputes. In other words, dispute is a manifestation of the deep rooted conflict. A dispute is defined as ‘a class or kind of conflict, which manifests itself in distinct, justifiable issues. It involves disagreement over issues capable of resolution by negotiation, mediation or third party adjudication’

Construction projects are always unique and risks raise from a number of the different sources. Construction projects are inherently complex and dynamic, and involving multiple feedback processes. A lot of participants – individuals and organizations are actively involved in the construction project, and they interests may be positively or negatively affected as a result of the project execution or project completion. Different participants with different experience and skills usually have different expectations and interests. This naturally creates problems and confusion for even the most experienced project managers and contractors.

Since the main purpose of this paper is to examine how construction contractors deal with their general overhead costs, an interview should be conducted to know how contractors allocate general overhead cost to construction projects to get profits. Indeed, each construction contractor may use a specific method when allocating. Due to our interest in estimating, the interview was conducted with a senior

If there is a situation of mistrust, raising the frequency of interchange meeting from one meeting per month up to one meeting per week is important. But the negative thing of this change is the huge amount of paperwork. Meetings could also be postponed which leads to a time delay. Furthermore, to improve the interchange of information between the contractor and the customer, the contractor should place some stuff to the company of the customer.

Within a project, the project’s success and budget belong to and are the responsibility of the customer. The Customer should have the final say in regards to what is acceptable and unacceptable in regards to risk and the quantification of risk. It is however, the contractor’s responsibility to be the primary source of expertise on a project or what they are being contracted to do. The contractor should offer their opinion and recommendations, and the customer should take their contractors opinions and recommendations seriously due to their expertise in the area. Overall, collaboration between the customer and the contractor should be the ultimate way to resolve a matter of dispute. Members from both the customer and contractor side should meet discuss historical events, modeling and simulation to arrive at the appropriate answer. Also, with quantifying risk, the customer and the contractor should be able to go back and look at the data. With risk quantification, there should be very little room for opinion and judgment which should make it easy to base a decision or a resolution based on hard core data. If a solution or an answer is not able to be decided upon, a third party consultation

Loosemore (1998) conducted a case study of a construction crisis to challenge the view that quantitative methods cannot be used to understand the social nature of construction research. This research found that the quality of communication could be indicated by the advantages and damaging effects of factions. During phase 1 of the crisis management process, there was one faction which consists of the architect, engineer, contractor – quantity surveyor and contractor – site manager. It indicates that there was good communication across the consultant/ contractor division. In comparison, during phase 3 of the reaction process, the communication was not positive. The dangers of factions could give some indication of the negative communication. Specifically, the site manager and engineer still formed the strongest faction, revealing a lack of focus among other actors. Additionally, a relatively equal distribution of a relatively high level of closeness could be indicative of effective communication with minimal distortion.

This part of the questionnaire’s target is to identify the level of importance of external stakeholders also referred to as salience like it was said previously in the paper. The first section rates the level of salience of external stakeholders from the most significant to least significant. Since qualifying eternal stakeholders is also appreciated tool in mapping, the second section of this question reveals the effect of external stakeholders on construction projects is the aim of discovering whether their effects can be directly or indirectly impact a project.

Construction project is complex and unique environments that involves many parties to accomplish successful project which many of them have different backgrounds, expectations, perceptions, knowledge and experiences. It can lead clash among parties, which have discrepancy standard specifications and outcomes. In terms of prevention and reduce of dispute in construction projects, this study has aim to identify the most frequent events can contribute conflicts and disputes during planning design and execution work project phase. The result present that the high probabilities occurrence divide into four main categories as follows, non-performance, payment, time, and the site and execution work.

The construction industry much like other industries is dependant with the distribution of “scarce resources” (Drake,1994). Many of its resources known as the factors or production i.e. labour, capital, land etc. are limited (Gregory-Mankiw, 2008), however, wants and desires within the industry are infinite (Myers, 2013). Kishtainy notes that this creates two problems; at any given time, there will be a fixed number of resource, against numerous wants. Sloman 2003 adds that in an effort to rectify this, he argues that we must make choices, in terms of choices within the construction industry Myers suggested that firms need to considered their investments made, how they construct and for whom they construct for.