An Empirical Study On Owner’s Management Control On Contractor’s Cooperative Behavior

Engineering projects are temporary organizations with complex and dynamic environment characteristics,and engineering project teams are composed of individuals with different knowledge and skill backgrounds.Therefore,the quality of cooperation between the participants determines the success of the project,especially the cooperation between the contractor and the owner,which is the key to the success of the project.Based on the principal-agent theory,many researchers generally use contract governance and management control in engineering project context.Managerial control is a mechanism used to motivate individuals to act in a manner consistent with organizational goals.Many literatures on agency theory show that the process of management control influences the behaviors and activities of participants,and thus plays an important role in the cooperative behavior between organizations.In this paper,management control mechanism is divided into formal control and informal control,formal control includes behavior control and outcome control,and informal control includes clan control and self-control.Based on the existing literature,different forms of control produce a variety of behavioral results,and the research on management control is mostly concentrated in the field of information system engineering,and there are few studies on management control in the field of engineering projects.In addition,organizational justice is also an important perspective to understand and explain the cooperative behavior of proprietor and contractor.Therefore,this paper introduces the concept of fairness perception,and discusses the influence mechanism of owner’s outcome control,behavior control,clan control and self-control on contractor’s cooperative behavior based on the engineering project situation,and analyzes the mediating role of contractor’s perception of fairness in the relationship between managerial control and contractor’s cooperative behavior.Firstly,this paper adopts literature study and deductive reasoning method to systematically grasp the research context of management control fairness perception and contractor’s cooperative behavior.Based on management control theory,inter-organizational equity theory,principal-agent theory and social exchange theory,the research hypothesis is put forward.Secondly,209 valid data were collected by questionnaire survey,and the reliability and validity of the scale were tested by SPSS23.0 statistical software.Finally,the hypotheses of management control,fairness perception and contractor cooperative behavior are verified by structural equation model.The results of empirical analysis show that the positive effect of outcome control on contractor’s cooperative behavior is not significantly established.Both behavioral control,clan control and self-control significantly promote contractor’s cooperative behavior.Perceived justice completely mediated the relationship among behavioral control,team control,self-control and contractor’s cooperative behavior.The research paper enriches the understanding of management control in the context of engineering projects,builds the potential association among various constructs by using the fairness perception factor from the perspective of relationship,and deepens the existing quantitative research on the influence mechanism of management control,it has certain theoretical significance.At the same time,the research paper also brings management enlightenment from the practical level: pay attention to the management control mechanism,effectively construct and use different modes of management control;pay attention to the rationality of formal control and informal control,improve contractor’s perception of fairness,so as to promote the cooperative behavior between owner and contractor.