Influence of Organizational Culture and Leadership Style on Disputes in Construction Projects – A Contractor’s Perspective

Over the recent decades, studies on organizational culture and leadership practices have gained global attention across business management literature given their implicit influence on the organization’s success. However, very few studies tackled these practices in the construction industry research especially in Egypt. Unlike other industries, the construction industry is known to be a complex, dynamic, and adversarial industry sector due to its project-oriented nature where various stakeholders are involved and each have their own objectives. Consequently, construction disputes are inevitable to occur whereby previous studies revealed that the level of disputes have propagated throughout the years. This research aims to investigate the influence of organizational culture and leadership style, practiced in the contractor’s organization, on the causes of disputes emergence. Accordingly, a framework is developed to guide project managers in the contractor’s organization to employ the preferred practices that would aid in minimizing disputes occurrence. This research objective is achieved by formulating a survey questionnaire to be filled by project managers where this survey utilized both competing value framework and full-range leadership theories to explore the dominant organizational culture and leadership style, respectively. A total of 60 respondents’ data were collected and statistically analyzed through a correlation analysis using Pearson correlation to study the relationships between these tested variables. The survey results revealed that the dominant existing organizational culture and leadership style in contractor’s organization are market culture and transactional leadership style. Additionally, these existing practices showed a significant positive correlation with the identified most frequent dispute causes. On the other hand, correlation findings showed that both clan culture and transformational leadership style have a negative significant correlation with these dispute causes, which indicate that the adoption of clan culture and transformational leadership would help in minimizing disputes. Then, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 experts to validate the survey findings and to share in-depth insights on the means of minimizing disputes. Finally, a guideline framework is proposed based on the research findings, which suggests management strategies to minimize disputes that covers: (1) effective leadership by project manager, and (2) establish a positive project culture. This framework is further validated by interviewing experts to be evaluated in terms of its structure, applicability, and effectiveness