Negotiation In Construction Dispute: Power Source And Sense Of Power

Construction is one of the three pillar industries of national economy, which linksclosely with the economic development and sets up the economic base of the people’slife. In recent years, the soar of the economy has been promoting a growinginvestment in fixed assets. However, the incompleteness of the construction projectcontract, as well as the complexity and the uncertainty of the construction projectitself always trigger a series of dispute. Negotiation is considered as an efficientapproach to reach a solution with comparatively low transaction cost and satisfactoryrapport with the other party.One of the essential influencing factors in negotiation is what we calledbargaining power. Although its significance has already been recognized, thereexisting a discrepancy in the influencing factors of the bargaining power all the time.Specifically, some scholars stress on enterprise and market, ignoring the individualeffect whose influence is considered to be trivial. However, from the view of the senseof bargaining power, this thesis tries to explore whether the perceived source ofbargaining power contains both the advantage of individual and enterprise.Deeping in literature in the past, three hypotheses were proposed in this thesis:(1)the advantage of enterprise has a significant effect on the sense of the bargainingpower;(2) the advantage of individual has a significant effect on the sense of thebargaining power;(3) the advantage of individual moderates the relationship betweenthe advantage of enterprise and the bargaining power. With an open-endedquestionnaire, the criteria to measure the advantage of individual and enterprise weredetermined. Combined with the scale to measure the sense of bargaining power, thesequestions comprise of the questionnaire, which was sent to experienced practitioners.145of them were available for the analysis. Then, I did a regression analysis and amoderate effect analysis by SPSS in order to test the three hypotheses forementioned.The result indicated that both the advantage of individual and enterprise work onthe sense of the negotiator’s bargaining power, which responding to the controversy inthis question. This thesis poses that in the situation of construction dispute negotiation,individual factors should be reckoned. Moreover, the advantage of enterprise was alsofound to be influential to the advantage of individual, and in turn, makes a furthereffect on the sense of bargaining power. This research reveals the relationship between the source and the sense of the bargaining power in construction disputenegotiation, sets up the system of the influential factors and provides reference for theconstruction negotiation practitioners.