Gender factor in construction conflict management: a study through a competency based after scenario behavioral rating

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2017
Ünsal, İzel
Construction industry’s nature is based upon short term, opportunistic and competitive relations. Due to this tough and competitive nature of itself, the industry is vulnerable to conflict scenarios in all sizes to be played out everyday. These conflict situations lead to schedule and payment delays, cost overruns, rework and cost and time consuming litigations. Therefore, the “managerial challenge” in construction sector is more than conducting transformation of resources between its planned start and planned finish. It is about how you can manage conflicts in an ongoing process, with minimum damage. According to the general idea, this proclivity in the sector for conflict occurrence is due to its male centric and masculine orientation. Although there are several studies using managers’ gender as a subject variable, the current literature falls short of valid studies investigating any gender effect on effective conflict management practice. The dominant approach thus far has been merely analyzing the managers’ performances in terms of “five modes of conflict management”. However, any managerial performance measure should depend on identifying its own situation specific behavior sets: competencies. Therefore, a peculiar set of competencies for effective construction conflict management performance is structured initially. Then, an after scenario questionnaire is designed including three hypothetical conflict cases. The questionnaire is distributed to construction managers to compare their management approaches through the same conflict cases. The respondents are asked to rate the seven alternative management scenarios referring to seven different competencies proposed for each case. Finally, the data derived are evaluated via relevant statistical methods and presented with tables and necessary illustrations.  

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Citation Formats
İ. Ünsal, “Gender factor in construction conflict management: a study through a competency based after scenario behavioral rating,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2017.