INFLUENCE OF CLIENT ORGANISATION ON ACHIEVING VALUE IN BUILDING DESIGNS

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Department of Environmental Design

ABSTRACT
Client organisations are becoming more involved in their projects and the strategic decisions they make are known to have significant impact on project outcomes. Despite this, there is limited insight on the influences of client organisation on value delivery given the importance of the design stage. Not surprisingly therefore, the lack of such insight is also contributing to the high incidence of dissatisfaction amongst clients of the construction industry. Exploring relevant theories toward providing greater exploratory pluralism, this research investigates the influence of client organisation on achieving value for money (VfM) in building designs. Evidences within the fields of organisational behaviour, small team literature, and supply management reveals that ?team functioning‘, a proxy for measuring the effectiveness of design outcomes can be influenced by client roles, contextual and compositional factors, all of which are reflective of the client organisation, and that these are mediated by the design process. Hence, these five constructs including the final outcome construct – value in design – formed the basis of developing the conceptual framework, its hypothecation and empirical investigation. The research adopts multi-layered mixed methodology design strategies employing exploratory multi-case studies and survey designs. This is predicated on the nature of the research problem which navigates between objectivism (realism) and constructivism (relativism) ontological considerations and situated within the positivism epistemological paradigm. For the case studies, client organisations formed the unit of analysis while for the survey aspect building projects were the focal unit of analysis. Hence, data were elicited from members of supply management units in client organisations using interviews (Directors of units in charge of procurement) and focus group discussions (five to six members working in each unit) sourced from 10 universities (5 public and 5 private); and from members of design teams (each team consisting of 5 members) who participated in 45 building projects across the 10 Universities; all selected based on a non-probability sampling technique – purposive sampling. The constructs, were examined using descriptive and explanatory analytical tools, on one hand; and using content and comparative analyses on the other while influences were arrived at using regression modelling techniques. Major findings from the research indicates that client organisations are underdeveloped to undertake strategic supply management but are most capable for operational supply management; and that they operate reasonably with specific strategies at the corporate and operational level but not popular with functional level strategies. While they possess adequate competencies and skills, there is room for improvement. Managing relationship comes with its specific challenges given that the client organisations first do not seem to focus on the main issue of a relationship – the process – but rather tend to manage the ?agreement‘ and second, they believe that only the performance of the design partner should be measured. These findings do have significant impact on the effective strategic management of the supply chain. In terms of their value systems, the study found that definitive value determination process exist in client organisations but in most cases they are informal, and that though there exist opportunities for value dialogues during design process, value judgements are still heavily reliant on the famous iron triangle in construction – cost, time and quality. This reveals the ineffectiveness of the value system of client organisations and its inherent inflexibility toward positively influencing value delivery. Notwithstanding the aforementioned challenges, while client roles in the industry are rated as extremely important, the level of their performance by client organisations is out of sync with the level of importance attached to them – their performance is moderate. Of the three client organisation parameters (COPs), client roles (design, leadership, procurement) have significant influences of -14.6%, -21.3.0%, 22.0% respectively on conflict resolution; organisational context (evaluation) has significant influence of 41.7% on communication and 34.8% on conflict resolution; while team composition (personality and general roles) also have significant influences of -15.5% and 20.7% respectively on communication and 0% and 30.3% respectively on the conflict resolution. None of the COPs have significant influence on collaboration. Finally, it was established that under mediation, client roles and organisational contexts do not have significant influence on team functioning; while team composition (personality and general roles) have significant influences of -18.1% and 63.1% respectively on team functioning. And that of the three known mediators of teamwork, communication and collaboration have significant mediation influences of -11.5% and 11.8% respectively between the COPs and team functioning while collaboration is not a significant mediator between them.