Determination of Critical Cultural Factors In Construction Project

The concept of cultural capital is becoming more relevant to the construction industry. This concept has been adopted from the manufacturing industry. The extent to which an organization utilizes and nurtures its culture would provide a useful indicator for its success. A research has been conducted to determine the available type of cultural factors, the effect of these cultural factors on the performance and success of construction firms, and evaluate possible positive and negative cultures in the Iranian construction industry. The research involves a questionnaire survey and interviews. This paper reports the findings on the questionnaire survey. The study covers five dimensions of project control factors, namely quality, cost and profit, schedule, safety and loyalty and relates these factors to eleven cultural factors. Some of the cultural factors are: recognition, project axiology, behavior rule, social environment, project visualization, human resource management, immaterial capital, project culture atmosphere, and job site culture. Findings indicate that most of the cultural factors were given indicated as very important in the project management. This stirring discovery means the cultural capital has already played a significant role in the current construction project activities. The importance rate of each cultural factor to every project control dimension totally 55 branches will be presented. Therefore, a visual reference for contractors to implement the cultural capital management methods to the real production will be shared. More interestingly, this research also discovered some potential effect from the difference of respondents’ personal characters e.g. religion and the difference of respondents’ working background and after-tax profit to their view of the importance of every cultural factor. Some of the significance rate is much more than the researcher’s expectation.

Keywords:

Construction Management , Cultural Capital , Quality , and Productivity