Building an effective interfirm networks for enhancing contractors' project competitiveness

Competitiveness is an important concept to contactors due to fierce competition in the construction industry. In order to outperform their competitors in the market, contractors are keen to realize their competitiveness by measuring it for benchmarking and improvement purposes. That is the reason why competitiveness for construction has been an active research topic. Yet, little has been done in addressing the methods to improve competitiveness in the construction field. Previous studies have proved that networking is an effective tool for gaining competitive advantage over competitors. It is therefore important to gain a clearer understanding of the effect of contractors’ networking to their competitiveness in the construction industry. This paper focuses on the ways of enhancing contractors’ competitiveness in the networking perspective. A research model was developed in this study and the relationships between contractors’ network performance and their success of competitiveness were examined by the use of multiple regression analyses. The findings show that contractors’ networking techniques are related to certain outcomes which in turn stimulate the level of competitiveness. In particular, the techniques of supporting information exchange and organizing project communication stood out to be the highly significant predictors of competitiveness attributes.