System Complexity Of Project Culture And Its Evolutionary Mechanisms

Large-scale construction project organization is a multilevel, open and complex system, which is composed of various participants with their own targets and whose nonlinear dynamics is subjected to a variety of factors. Owing to the incompleteness of current operating mechanism of China’s market economy and its supporting systems, many project managers are trying to use the cultural management to address serious challenges faced in the pursuit of excellence in project performance. In this dissertation, a project culture dimension model is established and the correlation of the project cultural dimensions and project performance is verified. The self-organizing characteristics of project culture systems are summarized, and three evolutionary mechanisms of project culture systems are derived by using self-organizing theories. Catastrophic phenomena in the opinion coupling dynamics between cooperative participants, the competition and synergy of different opinions in a dynamic communication network and the coupling evolution between project culture and project performance are analyzed using three different kinds of complex system analysis tools, respectively. Technological roadmaps and strategic choices for project culture construction are also discussed. More details are listed bellow.Firstly, a five-dimension model of Chinese project culture is established using the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. A questionnaire survey was conducted in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong provinces. The results verified that all five cultural dimensions are positively correlated to the project performances, and there are significant differences in the cultures of the project organizations working on different projects.Secondly, self-organizing characteristics of project cultures are found using the observational induction and theoretical deduction methods. A hierarchical holographic modeling framework for project culture analysis, which includes six perspectives, is proposed and used to explore the relationship between different factors. Three evolutionary mechanisms, i.e. the formation mechanism of dissipative structures, the power mechanisms of competition and collaboration, and the super cycle interaction mechanism in a project culture system are presented.Thirdly, an opinion evolutionary model is developed that allows for the initial opinion difference between participants, the cohesive effect of their own corporate culture and the coupling effect of their cooperative willingness. Cusp catastrophe phenomenon and three distinctive evolutionary regimes, i.e. an opinion deadlock regime, an opinion convergence regime and an opinion bifurcation regime are found in the opinion evolutionary system. In the case of three-group project, the symmetry breaking phenomenon may cause the project organization split into two distinct camps. This kind of "organization polarization" ignored by Gabbay has important meaning to understand the opinion dynamic characteristics in a multi-group project. The culture transmission in a dynamic social network of project organization is studied using a culture transmission model with a dynamic complex network. It is found that both the coupling strength between cooperative participants and the power distance between levels contribute to quick access of the culture to a steady state, and the learning leadership is most conducive to quick formation of a unified outstanding culture. A system dynamics model based on the coupling evolution mechanism of project culture transmission, project management practices and project performance is proposed to help project managers explore the dynamics complexity of quality culture construction.Finally, technological roadmaps and strategic choices for engineering culture construction are discussed based on the study of project culture’s dynamics characteristics and evolution mechanisms. A culture construction case in the Sutong Bridge Project is used to verify these roadmaps. The analysis results show that the conclusions obtained in the case have certain universality.