Conflicts Handling Styles Used by Professionals at Pre-Contract Stage of Building Construction Projects in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Conflicts between design team professionals is a common experience in building construction projects in Sri Lanka. Depending on the way they are been handled, these conflicts bring either positive or negative impacts to the project. Thus, this paper investigates the conflict-handling styles that the professionals use to handle different types of conflicts among themselves at pre-contract stage of construction projects in Sri Lanka. The study on different types of conflicts and handling styles were derived through quantitative approach by a questionnaire survey designed incorporating Rahim’s Organisational Conflict InventoryII (ROCI-II) with the participation of 42 number of professionals engaged during the pre-contract stage of building construction projects in Sri Lanka. The scope of the study was limited to the building construction projects and only to the conflicts among professionals at the same level. The collected data were analysed using descriptive statistics. The research findings revealed that there are four types of conflicts: task, relationship, process and status conflicts, occur in different frequencies among the professionals. The task conflicts occur very often, and process conflicts occur often whilst relationship and status conflicts occur rarely among professionals during the pre-contract stage. This study revealed that professionals use different conflict handling styles to handle these four types of conflicts among themselves during the pre-contract stage of building construction projects in Sri Lanka. Further, majority of professionals use integrating style often to handle conflicts among themselves, and they use avoiding style very rarely to handle the conflicts among themselves except for relationship conflicts. However, to handle relationship conflicts, professionals use dominating style as the last option. The study would assist the industry practitioners to identify their personnel conflict handling style and the outcome of using each style with their supervisors when handling conflicts during the precontract stage.