Research On The Mechanism Of Relationship Between Firms On The Choice Of Construction Negotiation Strategy From The Perspective Of Embeddedness

Disputes in construction projects often have the characteristics of long construction period,high project amount and great uncertainty,and easily lead to the rupture of the relationships between two parties.Accordingly,dispute resolution is always a key research direction in the construction industry.As the most commonly used alternative dispute resolution mechanism in the construction industry,negotiation is always favored by practitioners because of its high efficiency,low antagonism and low cost.Due to the fact that construction negotiation often takes place at the project level,past researches on construction negotiation were mostly carried out at the project level,but ignored the factors at the firm level.Although firms don’t directly participate in project management,as the ultimate winners of projects,firms has an important impact on project management.Therefore,this thesis explored the internal mechanism between inter-firm relationships and construction negotiation.Based on deterrence theory,resource dependence theory and embedding theory,this thesis establishes the research framework of inter-firm relationship and construction negotiation strategy,and puts forward five basic assumptions.To verify the hypotheses and theoretical model,the author obtained the measurement scales of variables by literature review,and designed the questionnaire according to the research context.Considering the research needs,this thesis chooses contractors as research subjects.Finally,166 valid questionnaires were received.The empirical results analysis by software show that: firstly,owners tend to choose a cooperative negotiation strategy when joint dependence is high,while a distributive negotiation strategy will be probably preferred by owners when owners hold dependence advantage.Secondly,the effect of joint dependence on negotiations is entirely mediated by long-term orientation,but there is no significant correlation between dependence asymmetry and long-term orientation.Thirdly,contractors’ relational embeddedness can weaken the effect of dependence asymmetry on negotiation strategy.By analyzing the mechanism between interdependence and negotiation strategy,this thesis explains the mechanism between inter-firm relationships on construction negotiation.From a theoretical point of view,this thesis transfers the research of construction negotiation from project-level and negotiator-level to firm-level,which enriches the research scope of construction negotiation.At the same time,the thesis focuses on the impact of social networks on the dyadic relationships outside of the networks,which expands the application boundary of social network theory.From a practical point of view,this thesis provides some guidance to make owners more willing to choose cooperative negotiation strategies,which is conducive to achieve win-win negotiations,thus provide suggestions for the healthy development of the construction industry.Finally,this thesis enumerates some limitations in the research,so as to provide some ideas for future research.