Effect Of Interpersonal Ties Between Boundary Spanners On Contractors’ Cooperative Behavior

Cooperation is a fountain of value creation,which plays a crucial role in project success.Most existing researches focus on the significant role of organizational attributes in enhancing cooperation.However,an intriguing research question has remained underexplored: can individual factors(interpersonal ties between boundary spanners)encourage exchange partners to perform cooperative behavior? In addition,there are still differences in the mechanism of interpersonal ties on cooperative behavior.Therefore,the author tried to make interpersonal ties to be composition of the research framework and considered it as a multi-dimensional variable,thus to particularly analyze the mechanism of different dimensions of interpersonal ties on different types of cooperative behaviors of contractors.A questionnaire was used in current study.The author invited senior project practitioners from the construction engineering field to fill in the questionnaire.They are rooted in the front-line of the project and master detailed project information.A total of 248 valid samples were obtained and our measures indicated good reliability and convergent reliability.The empirical results indicated that obligatory ties have positive correlation with contractor’s in-role behavior,but instrumental ties can positively forecast both of contractor’s in-role behavior and intra-role behaviors.Moreover,the relationship between instrumental ties and in-role behavior is stronger under the condition of low dependence asymmetry.However,we find that affective ties only positively affect contractor’s intra-role behaviors and that this positive relationship is weakened by dependence asymmetry.Theoretically,identifying the interpersonal ties as an individual level trigger of cooperative behavior and considering it as a multi-dimensional variable contribute to develop a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of interpersonal ties and open the “black box” of their internal role.Besides,our work can not only remedy the limitation of existing research that few researches concern the individual-level triggers of cooperative behavior,but also better realize the benefits generated at the interpersonal level on the organizational level.In addition,this study introduces contingency factor(dependence asymmetry),which conduces to expand the boundary conditions of existing studies.In practice,this research reminds project managers of the importance of interpersonal ties in order to enhance cooperation.