The Importance Of The Empathic Ability Of Project Participants During The Preconstruction Phase To Construction Project Performance

Abstract

The aim of this research was to investigate if and how the project performance of integrated construction projects can be improved by focussing on empathy during the preconstruction phase. Big infrastructural construction projects often face a poor project performance which causes the sector is aimed at searching for strategies to deal with this. Looking at what drives project success it is said the people involved and their competences are main factors of influence. These people need to integrate working processes and collaborate with each other to successfully deliver the project. Experiences from practice and a literature review resulted in a strong expectation that especially the competence empathy is important to this in construction projects. This would be important during the preconstruction phase in specific to support the alignment and integration between project team members. The research focusses hereby on the preconstruction phase of integrated construction projects and follows the Integral Project Management (IPM) structure to describe the structure of construction project teams. Empathy is defined as ‘the ability to understand and share the feelings of another’. The research adopts a difference in internal empathy ( = empathy between people within the project organization) and external empathy (= empathy with the client and/or stakeholders).

The research first investigated in interviews with experts from the industry if and where during the preconstruction phase it would be important for the involved people to be empathic. Second the empathic ability of a construction project organization has been measured to indicate how empathy is distributed across project participants. The results showed that the construction professionals on average score low on empathic competence and that in certain situations it would be important for project participants to be empathic for a good project outcome. This results in a gap in the construction sector between required empathy and actual empathic competence which demonstrates there’s room for improvement in this area.

Based on the results of the research it seems that the project performance of integrated construction projects can be improved by focussing on stimulating more empathy between client and contractor and towards stakeholders during the preconstruction phase (= external empathy). Especially in the relationship between client and contractor there’s room for improvement as there’s a gap in required empathy of the contractor. The reason that the performance of construction projects can be improved via external empathy is that when looking at what mostly causes projects to perform badly, it is said this is often related to a bad collaboration between client and contractor and/or insufficient involvement of stakeholders. The research results also showed that project performance can be improved by focussing on stimulating more empathy internally in the project organization within teams and between people from different disciplines. However, this has a lower effect on improving the performance of the project compared to stimulating external empathy. The research finally presents The Empathy Framework as a recommendation for the construction sector to be used as a strategy to improve project performance via empathy.