Summary: |
The importance of trust in construction is well documented especially when the desire is to encourage people to work as a team and to collaborate on construction projects using diverse information technologies. Trust is an integral component of effective teams, successful partnering, and implementing new technology. Building and maintaining trust between contracting parties can lower costs, improve performance and minimize disputes. Construction literature has discussed the types of trust, dimensions of trust and trust building tools. However, a need exists to further explore the importance of aligning the interests of contracting parties. Aligning interests are in addition to the traditional critical success factors for construction projects (profit, cost, schedule, quality). Trust is a state of mind that is strengthened or weakened as each party’s hierarchical and subjective interests are supported or challenged. This paper presents an integrated trust model and describes strategies aimed to build and maintain trust in construction when using collaborative technologies. The model further demonstrates that project managers using a specified strategy and system to elicit, monitor and align collaborative interests , in addition to other traditional measures of project success, can improve the likelihood of building and maintaining trust in deploying collaborative technologies in construction. |