The Conflict Management Style Adopted by the Subcontractors of Hong Kong Building Projects

It is a common practice in Hong Kong for the main contractors of local building projects to sublet most of the work to subcontractors. Consequently their roles have gradually transformed from a constructor to a manager of subcontractors. The outcomes of a project therefore depend heavily on the subcontractors’ performance. However, most of the subcontractors complain that they are unable to efficiently and effectively operate due to site coordination problems, such as inaccurate site reference lines, caused by main contractors. The site problems may consume significant amounts of resources in practical solutions cannot be agreed by the project participants early enough. Rahim Organizational Conflict Inventory-II (ROCI-II) model was developed by M.A. Rahim that measure five types of conflict management style including Integrating, Obliging, Dominating, Avoiding and Compromising. This paper presents the questionnaire survey based on the ROCI-II model to rank the preference on the conflict management style adopted by the project representatives of the subcontractors in handling the site coordination problems and its impact to the time used to agree the solutions to the different types of site coordination problems with main contractor. The survey results show that most of the subcontractors’ project representatives preferred to adopt the Compromising style to tackle the site coordination problems and the time used to agree the solutions with main contractor was influenced by the conflict management style adopted.