CHAPTER 4

Human Behavior Theory Aspects of RBP

Chapter 4 Introduction

In this chapter, we discuss some of the most relevant human behavior theoretical concepts relating to relationship-based procurement choices. Figure 12 illustrates this chapter's structure.

We present a section on trust and commitment following this brief chapter introduction, because this is a core and fundamental feature of RBP approaches. Similarly, the section on collaboration frameworks discusses vital aspects of co-learning the ability of people to acknowledge the perspective of others and to the value of empathy. The section on strategic HRM is central to our analysis of the skills and experience part of the KSAE required of RBP forms. This leads into a necessary section on the classification of capabilities and frameworks that may be applicable to the aim of this study. We wrap up the chapter with a chapter summary.

Trust and Commitment

In Chapter 3 in the section on the business justification for outsourcing, we discussed the business logic of outsourcing from a TCE perspective. We pointed out, using a number of cited sources, that trust enabled a cost saving in reducing the investment in the need for vigilance against exploitation of one party by another as well as the cost of preparing countermeasures to ensure that issues such as instructions and their rationale are fully documented. We also highlighted that gaining trust involves an investment in energy and time, and that this includes not only the cost of doing this but also an ability to build trust and commitment.

Further, drawing upon the cost-benefit of trust, Hosmer (1994) directs to our attention to the need for managers to be concerned about fairness and the way that benefits and their costs are distributed so that those they deal with can gain a sense of being treated reasonably and ethically. He further underpins this line of argument with a discussion on the link between ethical behavior and being perceived as trustworthy (Hosmer, 1995), and this reinforces our previously cited quote from Eisenhardt (1989, p. 58) about agency theory, where a prime concern is first how trustworthy parties are, and second how effectively one party can understand another party to be able to interpret what they are negotiating and what the offers and acceptances really mean. Trust and trustworthiness become an asset and a tradable commodity in the sense that it can be used to offset costs that would otherwise have to be expended.

We now draw upon some salient theories of trust and commitment and follow with a discussion of trust and culture.

Elements and Models of Trust

The most frequently quoted theories on trust are based on early work of Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman (1995) and elaborations upon their model. Figure 13 illustrates our adaptation of the original Mayer et al. (1995, p. 715) model. The model makes sense if we assume that people engaged in this set of thought patterns are rational and that they calculate trust in a self-interested way. The key to the model is that trust involves a person willing to take a risk that they are making themselves vulnerable in some way and that the person is making a calculated rather than emotional decision to trust, not trust, or distrust. We acknowledge the criticism made by some authors (Denis, Langley, & Rouleau, 2007; Langley, 1995; Langley, Mintzberg, Pitcher, Posada, & Saint-Macary, 1995; Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, & Van De Ven, 2013) that decisions, and therefore perceptions of trust, are driven by rationality and logic as well as by emotions and haphazard events. This may affect people's cause-and-effect perception and their attitudes toward perceived trustworthiness. However, as much of the literature on trust and commitment has its basis in rational thinking, we will pursue this line of reasoning in this chapter.

The sequence of events that affect trust, illustrated in Figure 13, is as follows: First, there is a residual propensity in a person considering trusting another (or entity such as an organization or governance system). This is driven by three main factors, as illustrated in Figure 13. Ability refers to the capacity and motivation of the other person (or entity), hence it has two elements; the first is about having the ability to do something and the second is about being committed enough to perform to the level of capacity. Benevolence refers to the feelings toward that individual. We would expect and hope for feelings of parties not wishing to inflict harm, but this is mitigated by recognition that harm may occur unintentionally despite a motivation to not do any harm. This element of trust could also be about expectations of benevolence due to reciprocity where favors or some form of obligation is being repaid. The third element referred to is integrity. This is about performance matching rhetoric and that is also mediated by motivation and commitment.

The mediating factor indicated in Figure 13 is commitment. Meyer and Allen (1991) developed a three component model of commitment that Meyer subsequently refined and expanded upon with others through empirical studies (Meyer & Herscovitch, 2001; Meyer, Paunonen, Gellatly, Goffin, & Jackson, 1989; Meyer, Stanley, Herscovitch, & Topolnytsky, 2002). In essence, commitment extends beyond mere compliance, that is, being required or coerced to do something. Commitment can be classified in three ways. Continuance commitment is a need-to form of commitment in which there is a cost that is implied or expressed in not doing something. Normative commitment is an ought-to style of commitment, being obliged to or feeling a form of loyalty to do something. The most intrinsic form of commitment is affective commitment, which is want-to type of commitment. In this style, there is some form of joint and aligned objective that drives decision and action.

The trustor needs to make sense of the risk and his or her level of vulnerability in the situation that requires trust, as well as the factors described above that affect the trustworthiness of the people/entity involved. The risk-taking situation is then engaged in and the relationships and behaviors of those being trusted are then tested. The value of the feedback that the trustor perceives and absorbs is dependent upon his or her ability at that time to clearly recognize and understand the outcomes. Understanding and judgment is mediated by at least three factors at the time the judgment is being made. First, the clarity of the outcome of the test is determined by perception of not only immediate observable outcomes but also anticipated projected trends. Immediate observable outcomes need to be interpreted, so aspects such as contextual clarity and knowledge as well as the maturity of the situation and trustor in this circumstance also come into play. In this sense the “stickiness” of knowledge, the way that lessons can or cannot be learned, also affects the clarity of context. We will explain knowledge stickiness in the next section. The judgment of the outcome of the testing of trust is then absorbed and the trust level for that person within a similar context is then recalibrated. This could involve a deepening of trust and willingness to accept greater future risk or the reverse situation.

Figure 13 illustrates a highly personal unit of analysis. To extend this, and better understand what may be happening in the trustor's mind at the organizational or societal level, we need to also consider how the model may be more widely applicable. Pinto (2000) discusses how understanding the politics of a situation is an important art, and this aspect is elaborated upon by Bourne (2011b) in her concept of “tapping into the power lines;” knowing how to access credible advice from those who may not necessarily appear influential in a situation but who may offer deep contextual knowledge about the situation. Das (2005) introduces time horizons into the sensemaking process and argues that situations need to be judged on the basis of temporal proximity or distance. For example, if a possible negative outcome is likely to happen a long time into the future, then we can assume that many things can change and there is time for intervention. Others have also argued, based on studies of trust, a range of temporal dimension implications. This dimension ranges from a form of “swift trust” that we see with Internet-connected teams (Bachmann & Inkpen, 2011; Jarvenpaa, Knoll, & Leidner, 1998; Perks & Halliday, 2003) to trust starting at near zero and building with experience (Lewicki, Tomlinson, & Gillespie, 2006). From the institutional perspective, Rousseau, Sitkin, Burt, and Camerer (1998) argue that institutional trust is reasonably stable because an organization's values and reputation are generally stable; however, as we have frequently seen, corporate scandals instantly undermine trust.

Trust can, and often does, cohabit with distrust as Lewicki et al. (2006, p. 1003) remind us with their four-cell model. Parties with high trust and low distrust are characterized as having high value congruence and confidence, hope and faith in their judgment. Low trust and high distrust are characterized by a “trust but verify” approach and features strict boundary distinctions and demarcation and a monitoring system designed to provide accountability and transparency. This latter set of arrangements is most strongly featured in project alliances, many JVs, and frequently in partnering arrangements.

Smyth (2006, p. 102–103) makes the point that the models derived from Mayer's work are predicated on calculative trust. This particular worldview refers overwhelmingly to self-interested trust where there is minimal evidence of trust but estimated high levels of mutual self-interest in obtaining a win-win outcome from the relationship. This requires the parties to trust each other and the systems in place to enforce that trust. He contrasts that with socially-oriented trust in which the enforcement mechanisms are social and potentially more powerful. He includes such things as social networks, peer values, brand/reputation, and the need for collaboration in these. Trust is realized at “a deeper level, generated through obligations in a social network and comes through reputation, advocacy and especially supportive relationships, where the motive is, ‘What can I do for the other party?’” (Smyth & Edkins, 2007, p. 234). Social trust is potentially more effective because while calculating self-interest and motivation is fraught with hazards of under/over estimation and short term perspectives, social trust is much more attuned to long-term assessment and being intrinsic, and so more in line with affective rather than normative or continuance commitment. Smyth (1966) illustrates a model in which conditions of trust (similar to the Figure 13 factors) lead from calculative self-interested trust toward socially oriented trust through mechanisms of faith (unseen capabilities of others parties to perform), hope (that they will perform to that expected), and confidence (based on experience of past performance, reputation, etc., and as an indicator of future performance), building within a socially driven (rather than governance and hierarchy driven) context. The model's building blocks are stated as characteristics of trust, components of trust, and conditions of trust (Smyth, 2006, p. 114–115).

The Trust Environment

The socially oriented trust perspective segues into a discussion on trust and culture. Linked to the above, and highly relevant to trust and culture in an RBP context, is the tension between trust and control. In the earlier discussion on the four-cell Lewicki et al. (2006, p. 1003) model, we saw the coexistence of trust and distrust. Das and Teng (1998) undertook a study of the relationship between trust, control, and confidence in a partner's cooperation and delivery on promises. They investigated JVs and minor and non-equity business alliances (as opposed to project or other alliance types discussed in this book), and their control dimension concerned hierarchal control and ownership control. While this does not have direct relevance to project alliances and other forms of RBP discussed in this book, it does provide an interesting perspective of the purpose of these governance arrangements.

All culture is derived at its taproots from common assumptions that are understood through explicit and implicit shared values. These are manifested through observable artifacts (Schein, 2004). This cultural influence shapes and guides an individual's response to organizational and social pressures.

Figure 14 illustrates the world of cultures that projects inhabit, and each of these has an impact upon people who are the core element of any organization. It illustrates the extent of cultural influence that shapes and guides their behavior and response. Trust, as we saw earlier, involves attributes of benevolence, ability and integrity that are interpreted through a cultural lens. For trust to be possible, and indeed nurtured, the project teams need to have common assumptions and shared values that support these attributes, but people in these project teams are part of and act within a wider world with a range of sub-cultures that have some shared and common attributes but other conflicting ones. Each person will have their own worldview partially, if not largely, influenced by their “home” culture. They also will belong to professions or associations that often have a code of ethics and culture. Organizations and teams or workgroups also will develop a culture. The whole system of interrelated sub-cultures interacts and changes.

While it takes a lot of time, energy and effort to change the taproot common assumptions and shared values, the observable artifacts can change more rapidly, and we see this as fads come and go (Abrahamson, 1996). Figure 14 helps explain how trust calculus and social trust may function. Observable artifacts can, at the superficial level, suggest a particular culture or subculture. For example, in a partnering culture there may be a partnering charter prominently displayed and even regular partnering workshops being held with all participants badged in some way with a common project symbol or icon. However, this is insufficient for a partnering culture to exist unless participants truly internalize the espoused shared values and absorb those values as core common assumptions about the way that they will behave and interact. When people are testing for trust indicators as illustrated in Figure 13, they are assessing evidence of artifacts and shared values achieving an authentic fit. Similarly, socially-oriented trust participants are seeking approval and validation from their valued professional, business, and social network subcultures to recognize their social capital “worth” and trustworthiness as well as their performance on past projects.

In terms of better understanding the values of regional or national cultures, we need to be aware of models and frameworks that help us understand the common assumptions and values. A great deal of research has been undertaken on the study of dimensions of regional/natural culture. The work was pioneered by Hofstede et al. (2010) and others such as Trompenaars (1993; Trompenaars & Prud'homme, 2004), and in a wide scale survey of 62 national and regional cultures (societies as they refer to them) undertaken under the banner of the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) Research Program. This resulted in two heavy but intensely valuable books (House et al., 2004; Chhokar et al., 2008) with a string of journal publications that may be more accessible to readers than these two books. These articles include House, Javidan, Hanges, and Dorfman (2002) and Javidan, Stahl, Brodbeck, and Wilderom (2005) with many others appearing the Journal of World Business. The relevant message from this body of work is that different regional/national cultures have varying shared assumptions about issues that can be categorized across a number of dimensions. Some of the most relevant of these to RBP are the ways that various cultures see legitimacy in power distance, role, and behavior to their fellows. To illustrate these dimensions, we summarize them in Table 3, based on the Hofstede's and GLOBE's dimensions of culture.

It is easier to understand, when the above is considered, how people can misunderstand each other or might take an emotional stance rather than a calculative one if their cultural norms are being challenged by others. This has a direct impact on how trust is established, maintained, and impacted. It also helps explain why different people will experience quite different degrees of discomfort with many ethical dilemmas and respond in a variety of ways.

Cultural Dimension	Implication for RBP
Large or small power distance: Power distance reflects the degree to which a society accepts a hierarchical system and unequal distribution of power.	Large power distance indicates larger inequalities between the members in these societies with power and those without. RBP usually seeks smaller power distance, though roles and escalation level guides are important artifacts.
Masculinity versus femininity: Masculinity reflects the degree to which a society defines achievement in terms of success and the acquisition of money or material possessions.	Some societies with sharp and strict divisions turn masculine; others when the divisions are loose and blurred turn feminine. In masculine societies, people admire success. In feminine societies, people pursue values such as relationship orientation, concern for quality of life, etc. This affects the likely mix of a risk reward design to incentivize parties.
Individualism versus collectivism: Individualism reflects the degree to which a society values independence from group membership.	It is concerned with the form and manner of the relationship between an individual and others in the society. In individualist cultures, people look after themselves and their direct families only, and they are expected to conform; while in collectivist cultures, people belong to larger groups that takes care of their interests in exchange for loyalty—relationships are therefore more tightly structured.
Strong or weak uncertainty avoidance: Uncertainty avoidance reflects the degree to which a society tolerates ambiguous situations and the extent to which it has created institutions and beliefs to minimize or avoid these situations.	In some societies, people do not feel threatened by accepting ambiguity and uncertainty. In others, uncertainty is seen as disruptive and makes people psychologically uncomfortable. Strong uncertainty-avoidance societies reduce uncertainty and limit risk by ordering and structuring things, imposing rules and systems.
High and low Confucian dynamism: Confucian dynamism is associated with the teaching of Confucius.	People in a country emphasize values associated with the future over values that focus on the past or present. In societies with high Confucian dynamism scores, people tend to be pragmatic, future-oriented, and focusing on obligations and tradition; in those with low scores, people tend to be normative and short-term oriented, quick results are expected, and people are more concerned with stability.

Table 3.   Dimensions of Culture (Source: Adapted from Rowlinson et al., 2008, p. 294–295)

To illustrate behavior and reaction by two people with different cultural influences, we need to consider what justice and fairness may mean to them when viewed through their specific cultural lens. Luo (2007, p. 644) identifies three separate types of justice:

1. distributive justice, related to the fair distribution of outcomes within a workplace;
2. procedural justice, the perceived fairness of the process by which outcomes are reached; and
3. interactional justice, the perceived fairness of the nuances of interpersonal treatment.

Somebody with a high power distance stance may be quite comfortable with high-status members of a project team gaining kudos and recognition even though they may have personally contributed little, while those with a low power distance stance may be highly offended and feel that the procedural justice and/or interactional justice aspects of the reward governance arrangements were unfair or even corrupt. In this way, each of the cultural dimensions can be judged by individuals through their own ethical stance and we could observe quite radically different reactions. We can see that this will affect how trust is established and maintained and how one person may perceive actions demanded of them perfectly consistent with their own ethical norms while another may feel pressured and bullied into being unethical.

While we do not argue that any one cultural dimension is superior to another, it is clear that several of the cultural dimensions pose challenges while others enhance changes of collaboration. We do argue that we can be more sophisticated in the design of procurement systems when we understand how culture can impact upon ethical stances, incentives (rewards and penalties), governance, and shared values to build and maintain trust.

Collaboration Frameworks

What does collaboration and collaborative frameworks actually mean? Even if we can understand and agree on what collaboration is, how can a collaboration framework facilitate innovation to result in efficiency and effectiveness? Also, how are benefits fairly shared? Who will gain from any benefits? There are many questions that this section attempts to answer. To do this, we focus on three core concepts that we feel are important to articulate so that these can inform our analysis of data and interpretations from the literature. These are co-learning, the ability of people to take the perspective of others and empathize, and how social capital can be nurtured and mobilized.

Collaboration, according to its root meaning is together (co) working (labor), and this is implied as being directed to the same end. It is linked to cooperation, which similarly means operating (doing things) together, though people may cooperate with few signs of heading for the same goal. This seems to be one difference between cooperation and collaboration. Projects, regardless of procurement form chosen, require teams of people to work together to deliver the project and de facto have a relationship, in that they are all parts of the same vehicle that delivers the project. At times they are working sequentially and at other times they are working in tandem. Teams, as we know, take responsibility for various parts of the project enterprise and so it is inevitable that they have a common destination goal, but the path there varies and they have different priorities and different side agendas. One entity generally takes on the role of system integrator to pull together the different threads into a coherent end state of project completion. Sometimes that maybe the POR, other times it is the lead design team's chief, and we also see examples where the lead is the contractor's chief. Thompson and Sanders (1998) provide a typology of four states of collaboration. Competition occurs when there is zero collaboration, as the entities are in direct opposition with only a win-lose outcome possible. Cooperation occurs with low to medium congruence of goals and objectives and the parties working alongside each other toward the project delivery. Collaboration is characterized by medium to high congruence of goals and with teams working together. Coalescing is where the teams join with high to very high objectives alignment. This gives a good picture of where collaboration fits within a continuum, but it only vaguely points to who gains the benefits. Their paper detailed significant savings in cost and improvements in delivery time, and so its focus is directed to the advantages to the lead contractor.

Collaborative networks may be formed for joint problem solving; often they are formed for knowledge creation and sharing. In the context of this book, we focus on them as entities that behave in a collaborative manner to achieve a specific goal. They may include teams of people contracted to jointly deliver a project as well as include wider connected groups and individuals outside the contractual relationship.

A good review of the project collaboration literature is presented by Anvuur and Kumaraswamy (2008) and they go further to describe how relationally integrated networks of project parties can be facilitated (Anvuur, Kumaraswamy, & Mahesh, 2011). A further example of collaborative networks that we mentioned earlier is the Atlantic Corridor, which engaged an entire continent's logistics delivery enterprises in a massive transformation of the way that they did business in response to global competition, deregulation, and the consequences of formation of a massive trading block in Latin America. This organization was established by representatives of government in Brazil to improve the region's network of shipping, trucking, and air freight companies and their clients and supply chain members. It facilitated more effective collaboration to further the aims of the Mercosur, the great South American common market. Arroyo wrote a very interesting doctoral thesis (see URL http://researchbank.rmit.edu.au/view/rmit:7891) on this particular collaborative network from a knowledge sharing and business transformation perspective (Arroyo, 2009). Several case studies from Arroyo's work have also been published (Arroyo & Walker, 2008; 2009), and the Atlantic Corridor concept was explained in Walker (2012). This provides a convenient entry to the next section.

Co-learning and Organizational Learning

Atkinson (1999) alerted us to the weakness associated with the iron triangle of time/cost/quality dominating the discourse on project success and being the sole focus for project performance. The re-thinking PM research group (Winter & Smith, 2006) provided a much-needed boost to reviewing project outcomes, and one strong outcome of papers from that initiative (Winter, Smith, Morris, & Cicmil, 2006) was the findings related to the lack of reflection of PM practitioners and the lack of valuing knowledge and innovation as a viable project outcome.

Several PM thought leaders have stressed the point that projects can, and should, be seen as learning vehicles (Koskinen, 2010; Koskinen & Pihlanto, 2006; Koskinen et al., 2003; Morris & Lock, 2004; Winter & Szczepanek, 2009). The theory of exploration and exploitation (March, 1991) has triggered useful discussion about knowledge management (KM) and organizational learning (OL). Knowledge and routines learned through exploration are then adapted and applied in varying similar contexts as a process of exploitation of knowledge. In essence, exploration occurs as a process of discovery such as when projects are used as experiments or purposeful learning experiences, what Brady and Davies (2004) call vanguard projects and others have termed “skunkworks” initiatives (Gwynne, 1997; McKenna & Walker, 2008; Tulley, 1998;). A critical requirement of those embarking on vanguard or skunkworks projects is that they have the capacity to recognize, reap, and accumulate knowledge—what Cohen and Levinthal (1990) refer to as absorptive capacity. However, many clients seem to lack an appreciation of the value of knowledge as a product of the PM process. Indeed, all parties involved are guilty to a varying extent of not absorbing knowledge from lessons learned and project reviews (Eppler & Sukowski, 2000; Gann, 2001; Oaks, 2008; Schindler & Eppler, 2003), indeed, organizational amnesia is a cross-business phenomenon (Othman & Hashim, 2004).

Despite this potentially gloomy picture, we now note a sea-change occurring with repeat clients that expressed value concerns about narrow definitions of project success that did not include innovation and better knowledge retention from project to project. This was highlighted over a decade ago in major reports on the construction industry, such as the frequently cited Latham (1994) and Egan (1998) reports and it appears that this situation has not experienced sustained change in the U.K. during the intervening period (Wolstenholme, 2009), despite the establishment of the Constructing Excellence organization, which promoted and facilitated reform of the construction project industry in the U.K. However, we now see a better appreciation of the role of intellectual capital in enhancing performance in general (Kang & Snell, 2009) and in PM work in particular (Turner, 2011). Learning, innovation, and knowledge transfer between the project team and the client and between team members is now being used as selection criteria (Walker & Hampson, 2003d) and demonstrated proof of innovation in project alliance KPIs (Rowlinson & Walker, 2008). Indeed, where innovation and knowledge transfer have been deemed inadequate, it has been used as grounds for criticism in project alliance performance (Wood & Duffield, 2009). This demonstrates that we have moved, particularly for repeat project clients, from a position of not being aware of the advantages of co-learning, knowledge exchange, and innovation, to requiring evidence through specific KPIs on at least some forms of project procurement. Clearly, an emerging class of clients see the benefit of knowledge and innovation as a project outcome.

How are benefits of knowledge co-creation, exchange, and use shared? Clients and users of project outcomes benefit in theory due to continuous improvement and efficiency gains, and this is the rationale behind the refinement of consideration of value for money that has recently emerged in the European Union (EU) in countries such as the Netherlands (Hoezen et al., 2012a) and Denmark (Gottlieb & Jensen, 2012; Manchester Business School, 2009b). We cited a study on the value of cross-team learning in JVs (Walker & Johannes, 2003) earlier in this book in the discussion of JVs, and we can add to this discussion another on the advantages of learning across supply chain participants in project work (Khalfan & Maqsood, 2012; Khalfan & McDermot, 2006). This suggests that the value of co-learning and innovation is being increasingly recognized and that it can be spread across all participants.

How does co-learning take place in project work? Much of this occurs at the briefing stage when the PO or POR works with the design teams and, in integrated design and delivery procurement forms, with contractors and specialized subcontractors and suppliers. Whenever people are forced to explain concepts or plans to others, they engage in two very important conversations. One conversation is with themselves as they prepare in their mind what to say, how best to frame that, and how best to illustrate their thoughts in a way that others might best understand their meaning. This preparation is vital, as it forms a reality check and self-reflective mechanism to filter poorly formed elements of their thoughts (Emerson, 1983; Luria, 1973; Vygotskii, 1986). The other conversation is with the listener who then reflects on this new information in an act of self-reflection undertaken through the dialog. In this way, the construction of meaning can be a highly creative exercise because as one party to a dialogue explains meaning and nuance, they not only inform the other party but they inform themselves and often take leaps of imagination as a form of creativity (Amabile & Kramer, 2007; Leonard & Sensiper, 1998; Leonard & Straus, 1997).

Co-learning and this form of knowledge exchange continues throughout the project delivery phase as problems arise, which require coordination and self-adjustment to enable solutions to be arrived at. Problems can be resolved more effectively when sufficient knowledge and expertise is exercised together with willingness of all parties to affectively commit to working toward problem resolution through a process of building social capital (Dyer & Singh, 1998). Many projects involve complicated or complex interaction of people, systems, technologies, and exogenous events. This makes it even more important that those engaged in decision making are as aware as is practicable about the context and potential consequences, and understand the motivations and priorities of others. Bakker, Cambré, Korlaar, and Raab (2011, p. 496) refer to three types of collaborative embedding that support the kind of relationship building that helps develop experience in knowledge recognition of the value of co-learning, co-generation of knowledge, and its use and exchange. These are relational, where several project teams from different organizations (or parts of organizations) are embedded in joint problem-solving activities, or where they share concepts, approaches, language, and ways of creating meaning, or being temporally embedded where teams have been working together on previous occasions. However, people can be exposed to and be invited to participate in collaborative processes, but this does not mean that collaboration will happen. The formation of absorptive capacity is one critical element, along with the motivation to collaborate.

We might ask what provides an enabler or barrier to this process. We can find some guidance here to answer that from the innovation diffusion and organizational learning perspective. Szulanski (1996; 2003) provides some useful insights into how knowledge and innovations may be diffused within organizations and communities in the concept he refers to as “sticky knowledge.” He uses sticky knowledge to describe difficulties in transferring knowledge about business routine between organizations; this knowledge of how to do something is wrapped up in organizational routines, some of which are well documented, but with tacit or implied aspects of knowledge that is difficult to imitate. Without intimate “inside” knowledge of an organization, knowledge transfer becomes difficult. Knowledge is then seen as sticky or viscous in that it does not flow easily from one source to another. Effective knowledge transfer requires understanding the context of knowledge source; it simply cannot be unquestionably applied in an “off-the-shelf” manner. Many readers will have observed from their own experience how often lessons learned that have been documented are not internalized and therefore lose impact. He provided some good reasons why this appears to be so based on his PhD research. He identified four general influencers of effective knowledge transfer, which are summarized in Table 4.

Knowledge Stickiness Element/Sub-Element	Explanation and Relevance to PM Team Knowledge Transfer
1 Characteristics of the knowledge transferred	It's difficult to transfer practices that have a high proportion of indefinable and tacit knowledge due to the tacit human skills involved, collective nature of the information, or idiosyncratic features of the context in which the knowledge is put to use (when there is ambiguity about why or when a practice works well).   Most projects are exposed to novel and complex contexts that various project cross-team members would have experience of, but each team tends to use its own jargon and therefore needs a forum to explain and communicate meaning.
2 Characteristics of the source of knowledge	Lack of motivation – project team members may fear losing ownership, privilege, and resent not being rewarded for sharing success. Also, knowledge available may not be seen as reliable, trustworthy, and knowledgeable.   There needs to be a systemic response to reward and facilitate knowledge exchange and a culture of respect for the expertise of others, including for technical and process knowledge.
3 Characteristics of the recipient of knowledge	Lack of motivation - the “not invented here” syndrome. Lack of ability to value, assimilate and apply new knowledge successfully to commercial ends (i.e., “absorptive capacity”). Lack of persistence to make it work instead of giving up and reverting to status quo (i.e., “retentive capacity”).   A culture of respect is needed so that potential recipient team members acknowledge the potential value of knowledge offered to be shared and re-interpreted. A command-and-control mindset through use of strict DBB specification and iron-triangle measures of performance inhibits people challenging the status quo.
4 Characteristics of the knowledge context	Creating the climate, culture, or ambience that nurtures knowledge transfer, perception sharing, and the necessary creativity to produce innovation.   Absorptive capacity relates in part to accrued experience in experimentation, critical analysis of mistakes (rather than attributing blame) engaging in co-learning, and negotiating various perceptions of “truth” and “facts.” Collaborative forms of project procurement enhance the richness and reduce the barrenness of a learning and innovative environment.

Table 4.   Project Collaboration and Stickiness of Knowledge Transfer

The characteristics of knowledge to be transferred vary. Some knowledge is highly explicit and not highly contestable, so the receiver of that information and knowledge can accept, believe, and associate with the source's validity. When the strategy for dissemination of “the message” is effective, this enhances motivation to collaborate on co-creation and sharing of knowledge, whereas in other cases where either the message source or recipient is not attuned to receive the message or feedback, then diffusion is retarded.

The first factor relates to the characteristics of the knowledge or message. Much of the most valuable knowledge exchanged in teams is tacit, that is, it is implicitly shared through shared experience so that while it is difficult to state what the whole background context contributes to meaning, the essence can be approximated through this shared experience. Characteristics may suggest inhibition or facilitation of knowledge transfer on this basis. Sometimes the source of knowledge or the message is a “hunch” or other contestable sources. This is problematic in the sense that tacit knowledge is notoriously difficult to transfer without also transferring insights about shared experience (Polanyi, 1997).

The second factor presented in Table 4 indicates the relevance of the source of the knowledge or information. Questions may be raised about that source's credibility and veracity or epistemological validity. We may pragmatically ask, is the source information/knowledge valid in this case? The source must be credible and must be open to being challenged and validated. This is not as simple a problem as clarity of message, though that is important, as it also involves entrainment of knowledge. Söderlund (2010) refers to entrainment as a condition of just-in-time access, when a person receives a message it is timed in a way that all the precursors to understanding the message are in place so the message is internalized. This infers that the context and historical trajectory must be prepared so that when that message arrives it makes sense and connects to the recipient.

The third factor relating to the recipient's view on this will affect the way that the message is interpreted and internalized. This depends upon the recipient's capacity to receive and internalize that message as much as the value of the message. There needs to be an adequate level of absorptive capacity, that is, the ability to receive a message and to be able to apply lessons learned from that message to advantage (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990; Zahra & George, 2002). Absorptive capacity requires certain cultural attributes discussed earlier and to be elaborated upon shortly, but these essentially allow people to experiment and reflect so that they can form mental scripts that allow them to perceive and recognize familiar patterns of actions that they can deploy to advantage. How is this capacity built? Much of it is by trial and error, or experimentation. However, just experimenting is insufficient; there needs to be consistent reflection and redefinition of what is perceived to be “the truth.” This is what is referred to as reflective practice (Schön, 1983). Reflection allows the possibility to move beyond cause-and-effect to hypothesize and create possibilities. This is where toleration and welcoming of variety of views is so important, because each party can add their perspective on an issue to “round out” a solution so that it is inclusive. Command and control regimes tend to undermine the collaborative process.

This leads into the fourth knowledge stickiness element, the characteristics of the knowledge context. Szulanski (1996; 2003) refers to this as a barren or fruitful context for knowledge transfer. Many project environments that have a skewed focused on exploitation of knowledge rather than exploration (March, 1991). Knowledge creation can undermine confidence in the knowledge. Others facilitate experimentation and reflection with a no-blame culture for making mistakes in which mistakes that generate learning and transfer of that learning are seen as an asset (von Krogh, Ichijo, & and Takeuchi, 2000; von Krogh, Nonaka, & Rechsteiner, 2012). The importance of creating a learning environment may relieve many of the time-lagged symptoms and causes in innovation and knowledge transfusion that was identified by Peansupap and Walker (2006) at the organizational, work group, and individual level. Many constraints that impose time lags relate to lack of support in the form of time to reflect, and time and resources to probe and experiment. We saw that these are critical to aspects highlighted in Figure 11 as well as being a consistent support of the organization being open, transparent and allowing “dirty linen” in terms of past mistakes to be on view and scrutinized to glean lessons to be not only acknowledged but infused in organizational decision makers.

Co-learning and organizational learning can be seen to be dependent on a form of contract that is supporting of co-learning and collaboration; supporting the intellectual activity of assessing project experience based on theoretical knowledge, experience. and reflection upon experience in an action-learning sense of plan, do, reflect repeat the cycle; and providing an environment that supports teams to learn and reflect in a collaborative multi-team contact context. as illustrated in Figure 15.

We argue that knowledge stickiness theory provides a key to understanding co-learning. The governance system can provide support through contractual requirements and performance (KPIs and KRAs) expectations. Support mechanisms need to be in place to provide intellectual stimulation, informed debate and questioning, and access to external expertise to bridge identified gaps as and when they arise. Finally, the team environment and context for support is a vital ingredient.

To illustrate the dynamic process of knowledge creation, sensemaking between people and the nature of gaps, and time lags we present Figure 16 from Peansupap's PhD thesis (Peansupap, 2004; Peansupap & Walker, 2006) in which he studied the diffusion of knowledge about groupware information communication technology (ICT) diffusion in four case study construction organizations in Australia that had already been using ICT for simpler applications, and thus had developed a high level of absorptive capacity.

Figure 16 illustrates how co-learning and organizational learning occurred in a case-study example at the group level within a network of project participants for a construction contractor. We see examples of support from the three contexts illustrated in Figure 15. The firm's policies provide some governance and contractual support, in this case through the resourcing of the ICT being diffused. Intellectual and practice support was provided through the technology champion, training and help-desk support as well as a social network. The team environment and network group also provided learning support.

The social network in this case comprised several communities of practice (CoP). Wenger and Snyder (2000, p. 139) describes CoPs as “groups of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise.” CoPs are often naturally forming entities though they are also often sponsored by organizations and institutionalized (Jewell & Walker, 2005). In the case study example Peansupap identified a number of intersecting CoPs (2004; Peansupap & Walker, 2005a). These can be seen from Figure 17 as including personal, professional and institutional as well as organizationally enabled CoPs.

CoPs such as the individual's previous workplace colleagues provide a powerful reference source to be able to refer to, even when they are in competing organizations, because they enjoy sharing stories. Teigland (2000) observes that what leaks from one competitor in terms of time and intellectual assets in solving problems is repaid at some future date due to a feeling of mutual obligation that becomes a motivation for social trust as discussed earlier. This form of collaboration among competitors appears to have advantages for all parties involved. It is tantamount to hiring short-term consultants on demand.

Another RBP dimension of collaboration through co-learning arises when people from different organizations voluntarily collaborate in CoPs as an alternative governance arrangement, either formally or, more often, informally. A project's governance system may be described as thick or heavily rule-and-regulation bound so that reliance of collaboration is assumed by prescribed organizational routines and processes defined in rulebooks or operational handbooks (Storck & Hill, 2000). Thick governance may lay much emphasis on aligning to strategy through artifacts by using manuals as boundary objects that proscribe activity. Governance may be described as thin when the governance measures are offered for guidance rather than for compliance. A well-functioning CoP can provide a more eclectic thin governance system by members drawing upon what pragmatically works using routines and processes from host organizations and those developed through interaction. This approach was shown to work with Xerox in the 1990s while undertaking a major transformation in the use of computers (Storck & Hill, 2000). We see the building of intellectual capital as effectively occurring through collaboration and co-learning within a company.

The relevance of OL to this section is that it is important that we understand how organizations learn through projects, and that they can optimise their learning through collaboration and reduce knowledge stickiness. Initial work by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) introduced the concept of knowledge creation and sharing through their SECI model in which tacit knowledge (implicit knowledge known to an individual through practice that is difficult to explain) is made available for sharing and being made explicit through a four step process. The first step of knowledge socialization allows tacit knowledge sharing among individuals. Articulated tacit knowledge is made explicit though a process of externalization of this knowledge followed by a process of combination of the different entities’ explicit knowledge with the recently explicit tacit knowledge. This is then internalized by embodying explicit knowledge into tacit knowledge. They also argued that this needs to take place in a specially constructed knowledge-friendly environment referred to by the Japanese word ba (Nonaka, Toyama, & Konno, 2001). This approach had a focus on turning tacit knowledge into accessible explicit knowledge, and much interest was then applied to technologies and ways in which knowledge could be created, stored, transferred, and accessed for use. Much debate arose around optimum models for use of a technology-centric or people-sharing-centric approach to that process.

Hansen, Nohria, and Tierney (1999) argued for an either/or strategy and claimed that a simultaneous focus on both strategies was divisive. However, Scheepers, Venkitachalam, and Gibbs (2004) later provided evidence from case studies where a simultaneous combination strategy was effective, and so the mix of focus on people and technology was contingent on environmental factors. Evidence on the way that a people focus for knowledge sharing on projects that were very strong on partnering and supply chain integration (for example, the Heathrow T5 project (Davies et al., 2009), or project alliancing (Walker, Hampson, & Ashton, 2003) and other similar collaborative RBP projects (Radosavljevic & Bennett, 2012)) indicate the need for strongly integrated and functioning common communication platforms for groupware applications and for sophisticated building information modeling (BIM) seen in many complex construction projects these days (Aranda-Mena, Crawford, Chevez, & Froese, 2009). Much of the debate about how best to establish mechanisms for effective OL revolved around codifying lessons learned so that knowledge gained through exploration could be exploited (Eppler & Sukowski, 2000; Maqsood, Finegan, & Walker, 2006; Schindler & Eppler, 2003;).

The mechanism for integrating individual's intuition knowledge to be developed at varying organizational levels into institutional knowledge is as important as individual and small group learning. Crossan, Lane, and White (1999) illustrated a framework for knowledge creation that is congruent with ideas of knowledge, being a series of stocks and flows of knowledge as proposed by Bontis, Crossan, and Hulland (2002). The mechanism by which these are facilitated by group processes of influence, social acceptance pressure, and the power of authority within an organization sanctioning the flow-forward and feedback loops, and also knowledge being reconceptualized and validated by people and groups, was demonstrated by Lawrence, Mauws, Dyck, and Kleysen (2005). Other contributions to OL have helped us better understand the mechanisms of KM. Järvinen and Poikela (2001; 2006) combined ideas from Kolb's (1984) experiential learning model of concrete experience being reflected upon, leading to abstract conceptualization into an hypothesis or proposition that is then tested along with the flow of knowledge through organizations from the individual perspective through a shared learning context to the organizational context. All these theories rely on reflective practice where participants in co-learning first need time and space (ba) to make sense of their experiences and are in a safe environment to do so. The call for reflective practice is not new (Schön, 1983), and more recent contributions highlight the value of reflection in both internalizing knowledge and in conducting essential internal conversations which allow that knowledge to be framed for external explication to enable tacit understanding (Raelin, 2007; Selvin, Buckingham Shum, & Aakhus, 2010; Shelley, 2012; Smith, 2007).

The whole field of OL and KM can be seen as evolving from at least three paradigms (Firestone & McElroy, 2004; Vorakulpipat & Rezgui, 2008). The first is about applying knowledge sharing through ICT platforms using a supply-side perspective. The second has a focus on best-practice and normative frameworks for converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge that can be shared by groups and organizations taking a demand-side perspective. The third scrutinizes OL and KM more holistically and probes into how individuals and groups interact and make sense of actions and environments and how they share these perceptions and perspectives (Firestone & McElroy, 2005). This critically questions KM because knowledge is not information; it is a perceived reality based on information and other stimuli. We are all individually constructing, therefore we can never “really” share knowledge but only close approximations of that knowledge, because our realities are shaped by and all stimuli being received (or rather perceived) in slightly different ways. This changes the dynamics of understanding co-learning so that KM tools such as portals, data/information mining, CoPs, knowledge cafes, storytelling, social network analysis, etc., are vehicles for managing information as a feedstock that an individual's brain processes and adapts to their own ontology or paradigm to create knowledge. As Firestone and McElroy (2005, p. 202) argue:

“Portals, like best practices systems, do not provide a way of distinguishing information from knowledge. As a consequence, any support they provide for integration functions such as broadcasting, sharing, teaching (through e-learning applications), and search and retrieval, is restricted to information, rather than knowledge, integration. Nor do portals generally provide targeted support for problem recognition, or for individual and group learning, or for knowledge claim evaluation.”

This leads to a fundamental issue in how OL and KM literature is useful in studying and understanding RBP. The fundamental building block we suggest is not OL or KM per se, but rather the act of collaboration of people challenging assumptions and making sense of problems they solve through practice and through jointly working to make sense of action and potential consequence. Cavaleri (2008) poses the question: Are learning organizations pragmatic? He states that the pragmatist framework is built on foundations of facilitation of people to learn over time, more specifically (Cavaleri, 2008, p. 478) by:

1. Thoughtful interpretation and enactment of one's environment;
2. Learning from the feedback of experiences;
3. Reflecting on past experiences;
4. Imagining how discovered patterns of cause-effect will potentially impacts future states;
5. Engaging in inquiry to assuage the irritation of doubt;
6. Taking targeted action to achieve a desired result or state of affairs;
7. Carefully reasoning to apply rules for action or create new rules;
8. Building knowledge through experimenting with one's actions;
9. Improving the quality of one's knowledge by incorporating discoveries from action and
10. Clarifying beliefs by paying heed to doubt, and using inquiry to improve performance.

This is clearly a more intellectual and collaborative process that the first order KM/OL paradigm of information sharing and interacting with an assumed or accredited concept of knowledge as some form of truth. The third-order paradigm of KM/OL is one of seeing a flow of knowledge that is created, challenged, and validated to be incorporated and embedded into the organization as the foundation of its cultural assumptions. As illustrated in Figure 14, however, when the culture is open, rich, and strong enough to embrace contest, as illustrated by the above 10 points, assumptions and knowledge are constantly adapting.

This model of a knowledge life cycle sees a distributed organizational knowledge base (DOKB), which we argue is an agreed and socially mandated approximation of knowledge-as-truth. It comprises both subjective and objective knowledge that forms a bundle of beliefs and claims. These are applied within a business processing environment, and that knowledge-processing environment mediates the DOKB. This helps to validate and assess the extent of truth of a knowledge claim. A knowledge claim thus passes through a knowledge production process in which individuals within groups shape a knowledge claim using subjective and objective information and existing knowledge, evaluate that claim and, through that processes of challenge, carry out re-conceptualization and validation work and decide how to integrate that knowledge into the organization for broadcasting, searching, teaching, and sharing perspectives (Firestone and McElroy, 2005, p. 196).

Zahra and George (2002, p. 195) identify three competency traps that can occur when organizations are collaborating and gaining absorptive capacity through a KM mechanism. They can become overly familiar with exploitation of knowledge and lose capacity or willingness for exploration. They may suffer a maturity trap resulting from being unable to conceptualize reliable and predictable outputs from knowledge exploration (such as a definition of value for money encompassing knowledge and competence), or they may suffer from what they call propinquity (nearness) traps, which is their disposition to explore knowledge in areas closest to their existing expertise so that they do not take advantage of radical changes. This latter trap is often one of being successful and not noticing when disruptive change is looming (Christensen & Overdorf, 2000; Gilbert & Bower, 2002). This can be dangerous and is one reason why exposure to alternative perspectives through collaboration and co-learning across firms or within organizational boundaries is an often unacknowledged advantage and value to collaboration within projects.

The final key point we make to conclude this section is that we argue, based on sound literature as well as our own research into how project alliances operate, that reflection, challenge/contest, and absorptive capacity to embed and integrate knowledge is based on the capacity of individuals and of their organizations to allow their employees to take the perspective of others.

Perspective Taking

The ten points of the pragmatist framework illustrated above stress several qualities of individuals and, by extension, organizations. One quality that stands out is humility. By humility we mean the capacity to acknowledge and accept that one is probably continually misinterpreting signals. This is an ontological and epistemological issue. The worldview that this represents is one where truth is considered contestable and highly subjectively constructed. If this is reasonable, then we must take the point of view of others into account and respect their opinion. This does not mean that the “other” is always right, rather their perspective may be useful in filling gaps or for challenging our own held assumptions. If we accept the likelihood that we are often misinterpreting signals, then it makes sense for us to avail ourselves of any tool that challenges our interpretation as being valid, invalid, or incomplete. In epistemological terms, others’ values and validity measures are also useful. If we believe that truth is constructed and not an objective reality, then we must accept that we are constantly working in clouds of approximations. Availability of guidance by others is, therefore, highly important.

Collaboration is, from the root formation of the word, “working together” and not engaging in a battle for a dominant truth. It requires consensus. Beliefs are based on current conceptualization of knowledge and reasoning about the validity of governing rules, assumptions and ways of assessing what is observed and experienced. When people take the perspective of others, they attempt to understand how others came to believe what they profess. By applying a temporarily adopted set of rules, assumptions and values when reasoning about a problem we can interrogate a problem, from a richer position; by doing so, we often modify our beliefs. We may totally reconceptualize a problem and this is what is often meant by “out-of-the-box” or, as Leonard terms this, thinking empathic design (Leonard-Barton, 1995; Leonard & Rayport, 1997; Leonard & Straus, 1997).

Parker et al. (2008, p. 4) provide a useful definition of constructive perspective taking as:

“Active perspective taking occurs when an observer tries to understand, in a non-judgmental way, the thoughts, motives, and/or feelings of a target, as well as why they think and/or feel the way they do.”

They go on to describe perspective effectiveness as:

“The degree to which the observer has a relatively accurate, comprehensive, and objective understanding and appreciation of the target's thoughts and/or feelings and the reasons they are thinking and/or feeling that way.” (2008, p. 6)

This provides a very useful framework for understanding what perspective taking means and its value in an RBP context. In their paper, Parker et al. (2008) present a figure that describes a model of outcomes of perspective taking. In that model they outline positive outcomes that include a more empathic approach to conducting a dialogue. The literature on innovation (Leonard & Rayport, 1997; Rogers, 2003; Sundbo, 1997; Thomke, 2001; van de Ven, 1986; von Hippel, 1990) suggests that empathic listening in a truly engaging manner provides a powerful driver for reconceptualizing both problems and solutions. People who are expert at perspective taking improve their cognitive responses, reasoning power, and effectiveness in understanding complex situations as a positive outcome. This ability expands their repertoire of perceived cause-and-effect loops that may operate and the awareness of their and others’ potential preconception bias of situations. The final positive outcome of perspective taking is greater clarification of meaning and identity between people engaging in any kind negotiation. Unanticipated ways of working can be developed that are more intrinsically rewarding by project team members consciously considering the client's and other team members’ perspective and their value proposition (Anderson, Narus, & van Rossum, 2006) through reconceptualizing the value and nature of tasks. Other personal dyadic outcomes that are presented in the Parker et al. (2008) paper includes: improved interpersonal relating; self-regulation; citizenship behaviors; improved dispute resolution and negotiation; and reduced prejudice, stereotyping and discrimination. All these qualities are associated with high levels emotional intelligence that has been shown to be valuable attributes of project manager team members (Goleman, Boyatzis, McKee, & Buntine, 2002; Turner, 2007; Turner & Lloyd-Walker, 2008; Turner, Müller, & Dulewicz, 2009).

The Parker et al. (2008) paper also identifies some negative outcomes. These include exploitation as well as conflict and self-interest and positive bias that need to be guarded against. Undue sympathy can result in manipulation and positive bias that transgresses the ethical process when making choices for example.

The broader outcomes are listed by Parker et al. (2008) as improved team and organizational performance. It is worth noting, particularly in response to the earlier section on the impact of culture, that perspective taking should be considered within context. Parker et al. (2008) do acknowledge mediating factors such as degree of independence. but their model ignores the type of dimensions earlier discussed in the GLOBE study. For example, perception taking may be inhibited by respect for authority levels, and feelings of discomfort with open communication in cultures where some forms of information disclosure may be considered disrespectful or even insulting. Those involved in perspective taking should also understand organizational culture constraints such as the importance of following organizational strategy and an insistence that all ‘singing from the same song sheet’. Without considering these dimensions a person engaged in perception taking may in fact be engaging in self-delusion.

Perception taking is vitally important in effective decision making, particularly when there are many ways to frame and explore a problem/situation, because it expands possibilities and ways of looking at a problem. This aids perspective divergence for pursuing innovation. However, it does have some disadvantages including vulnerability to potential manipulation either through conscious or unconscious influence. It also is more time consuming, and in circumstances where a rapid decision to act (in an emergency or crisis, for example), it can be too time consuming to be of value. This latter point is cautionary.

Social Capital

Social capital is the glue that binds people and organizations together. It refers to features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit (Putnam, 1995; Tsai & Ghoshal, 1998). Figure 18 illustrates the linkage of social capital and knowledge transfer activity that supports collaboration.

Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998) discuss and illustrate how people in groups create links across project and home organizational boundaries through having shared codes and language to be able to share perceptions, perspectives, and have common language to communicate these. Having the required trust, commitment and cultural norms and values enable people to work together in co-creating knowledge and learning from the tasks and routines they undertake. This drives the development of project capital (Brookes, Morton, Dainty, & Burns, 2006; Turner, 2011). Brookes et al. (2006, p. 477) define project capital as:

the sum of resources that can be used to achieve a project's goals that are available through the network of relationships associated with that project. It is therefore a function of not only the level of resources possessed by individual project actors but of the interconnectivity of actors in terms of the number of relationships between them and the resource conductivity of those relationships.” This way of looking at how organizations learn through collaboration is vital in understanding the importance of transparency in communications between team members about motives, aims and expectations.

Figure 18 illustrates how social capital dimensions determine the quality of potential knowledge capital for a project. Various actors within the organization have the potential to marshal their structural, cognitive and relational resources and the quality of their contribution can result in determining the expectations of various actors concerning what they will gain from the process, their motivation to exchange knowledge and information, and their access to sources of knowledge, as well as their ability to exchange knowledge. As we discussed earlier, the factors that determine knowledge stickiness mediate the knowledge creation, transfer and use activities and this in turn impacts upon the collaboration quality. Aspects discussed in this chapter and Chapter 3 will influence the nature or model of collaboration that is likely to occur. To an extent, this model can be designed and an optimum solution developed to configure governance and how best to facilitate the interaction of people to share knowledge that improves risk management and overcomes problems associated with dealing with uncertainty.

There is no shortage of subject matter experts in academia who have written widely on the value of social capital. These thought leaders, based on their research studies, write about the need to make the most of the link between the creation of human capital and a supportive workplace environment, personal motivation, personal competence and engaging and rewarding interpersonal contact (Brockbank, 1999; Dessler, Griffiths, & Lloyd-Walker, 2007; Gratton & Ghoshal, 2003; Lawler III, 2001; Ulrich, 1998). The workplace environment and the quality of interaction between parties are seen to be critical factors.

The interaction dynamics of collaborating individuals and teams when problem-solving in projects can be highly relevant to the procurement design. If we look through the analytical lens of exploration and exploitation, we can see that traditional transactional project procurement choices have a dominant focus on exploitation. Traditional forms of project procurement tend to reward exploitation of contract conditions, use of uncertainty as a lever to extract additional money or time, and a view of people in other teams as being “objects” with exploitable sources of knowledge and potentially lucrative mistake-makers to be used as sources of blame that can be sued. With RBP, by contrast, particularly for strong partnerships and alliances, people are brought together and rewarded for being collaborative. This is suggested by Groysberg and Lee (2009) in their study of employee “stars” in the financial services sector. They found that stars that based their career mark on exploration failed to live up to expectations when placed in a work situation that demanded predominantly exploitation strategies. They seemed to miss the hidden and often assumed culture of knowledge and perspective sharing that they had grown in their career within work environments that placed a high emphasis and reward on people sharing and building ideas. That is a workplace setting where there were high levels of social capital support. As we see from Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998), the quality and number of network links is important—the openness and common language and values as well as the trust and relationship-building qualities. This is similar to what Szulanski (1996) refers to as aspects of sticky knowledge that inhibit effective learning, where difficulty is caused in knowledge transfer through what he calls “a barren organizational context” and an “arduous relationship between source and recipient.”

We could argue, based upon our observations and past research, that social capital also provides a safety net where mistakes are able to be converted into learning opportunities, and where openness to recognize and broadcast enables colleagues to help overcome adverse consequences and to thereby build social capital and trust. Projects procured under alliances, for example, have KPIs that include learning within the team and between teams on a project. This encourages exploration as well as exploitation when attempting to be innovative and within the continual stream of small but significant problem-solving activities that these project teams engage in. Our studies on the National Museum of Australia (Hampson et al., 2001) and quotes published in Volume 2 of the AAA study (Walker and Lloyd-Walker, 2011c) suggest that encouraging innovation through specific KPIs and KRAs that demand both knowledge exploration and exploitation encourages social capital building within the project delivery organization.

Strategic Human Behavior Aspects

In this section we discuss a number of issues related to HRM that while they specifically relate to alliances they may also be highly relevant for other similar RBP forms.

Managing People Across RBP Forms

To a large extent, this research has been conducted and this book written because projects have become the common way of organizing work in all sectors of the economy (Lindgren & Packendorff, 2006). The way work is carried out has been changing, with project-based organizations completing their core business through project teams, and project-oriented organizations forming teams to deliver products and services within their traditional organizational structures (Huemann, 2010; Huemann, Keegan, & Turner, 2007), thus much of the activity in these organizations is now carried out within temporary organizations, or small project teams (Ekstedt, Lundin, Söderholm, & Wirdenius, 1999; Pettigrew et al., 2003; Söderlund, 2012). Huemann (2010, p. 362) stated that “there is a paradigm shift in the nature of 21st-century organizations with projects as a specific and significant characteristic.” People from a growing range of professions and backgrounds are involved because project teams are now used in health, education, the voluntary sector, and the public sector (Clark & Colling, 2005) as well as construction, mining, manufacturing, and research and development (Bredin & Söderlund, 2006). Indeed, the growth of project management as a profession confirms that the structure within which people work across a broadening range of industries, organizations, and roles has changed. The PMI-predicted growth between 2010 and 2020 in the demand for project managers would be strongest across seven project-intensive industries, leading to15.7 million new project management roles being created by 2020 (www.PMI.org/Pulse). Employment that involves project work is, thus, both already common and growing.

Fixed roles, reporting only to a divisional or business unit head, are no longer the norm for a large percentage of today's workforce. Permanent employees are now commonly deployed into roles within project teams where they may have a reporting relationship and deliverables to their project team leader while retaining responsibilities within their appointed role. For others, their project team duties may constitute their total work role for varying periods of time. In addition, contracting has become a career (Peel & Inkson, 2004) and these project managers join teams to work for a set period of time to deliver an agreed outcome, leave the organization on completion of their contract, and then seek new contracts with the same or other organizations to complete future projects. Project teams are now the common structure through which work is completed in organizations, and, at the same time, we have seen changes in the way in which project teams form and operate as new relationship forms evolve over time.

This confirms that in a broad range of workplaces work is now carried out differently to the way it was just 40 years ago. Human resource management (HRM) systems in use in today's organizations were designed to address the needs of organizations according to the way they operated in the past; they were designed to suit traditional organizational structures and ways of working. Bredin (2008) argued for the need to extend existing HR frameworks for use in project-based organizations to include people capability. This would involve developing people management systems which integrate “people capability with strategic, functional and project capabilities” (Bredin, 2008, p. 566), for instance building on the principles of capability framework models developed by Davies and Brady (2000).

It is necessary, therefore, to consider changes required within HRM systems to adapt to the use of temporary organizational forms, but additionally, we would argue, these systems need to be further adapted to suit the various different RBP forms. This needs to be addressed because HRM is “is of strategic importance in all organizations” contributing to their success and creating competitive advantage (Huemann et al., 2007, p315). Huemann et al. (2007) argued that project-oriented organizations create HRM challenges and Bredin (2008) referred to a range of studies that indicated that the people management systems developed for traditional ways of organizing work may not meet the needs of temporary organization forms. We would argue that this applies to all organizations that use projects to organize work and that additional challenges are presented by recent RBP forms.

We now discuss a range of areas where human resource (HR) expertise and input is required, and then discuss the role of the project manager and the alliance project manager. Next we consider a range of HR activities, many of which may now be devolved to line managers within traditional organizational structures and to project managers as a result of project intensification in organizations.

The need for HR to be closely linked to the business of the organization, to understand its core business and develop ways of supporting achievement of organizational strategy through people management policies and practices that enable goals to be achieved is not new. Ulrich (1997) and Brockbank (1999) were among several who identified this need for organizations in general, and Huemann (2010) outlined the specific need for HR to be aligned to strategy in project-intensified work environments. HR policies and practices have largely been designed for permanent, not temporary organizational forms, and don't generally acknowledge the ways in which projects are embedded within the organization or the temporary systems which are established, for instance to monitor task performance during projects (Sydow, Lindkvist, & DeFillippi, 2004) that need to feed in to permanent systems, such as the organization's overall employee performance management system.

It has been observed that within all organizations, in an effort to better support HR to become a strategic partner, a range of HR activities formerly believed to the domain of the HR or people and culture department have been devolved to line managers (Kulik & Bainbridge, 2006; Kulik & Perry, 2008). With people spending increasing amounts of time in project teams, or spending their career working on sequential projects, it is the project manager who now implements HR policy and practices across their project team. Project team members experience the employment relationship through their project leader and the way they manage their project team. As a result, there has been a call for new ways of managing the employment relationship that acknowledge the new way of working within projects (for example, Bredin, 2008; Bredin & Söderlund, 2011a; Clark & Colling, 2005; Huemann et al., 2007). Söderlund (2012, p. 1) has suggested it is time to analyze “different modes of organization of human resources” in project-based organizations. Bredin and Söderlund (2011a; 2011b) have provided the HR quadriad as a framework to analyze HR roles in project-based organizations.

Importantly, HR professionals in organizations that use projects will need to work with project leaders to agree how they might best support project team selection, development, performance management, and redeployment on project completion. This has been linked to their new strategic partnership role. The development of project leaders suitable for all relationship forms will require HR involvement to ensure that the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and expertise required to succeed across the full range of RBP forms is available to the organization, using permanent or temporary contract employees. HR practitioners will need to develop relationships with both line and project managers to support them in the conduct of an increasing range of HR activities that have now become part of their domain.

Project Manager and Alliance Manager Capabilities

In Chapter 4 (Table 5), we detail the expertise, competence, and knowledge required of project managers from entry level through to expert performer. This model of professional expertise and development is expanded in Chapter 4 (Table 6) to highlight the specific capabilities required of alliance managers.

Project managers and leaders of major projects, especially those leading major infrastructure alliance projects with budgets in excess of one billion dollars, now manage budgets greater than that which some CEOs are responsible for. For successful technology projects, Beheshti (2006) maintained the project manager must both understand the change and have a good understanding of the business in addition to their understanding of the technology. Extensive research into the professional skills required of alliance managers revealed a “defining characteristic of the highest level AM” which set them apart from other project managers was “being able to interact and influence at the business board” and that this understanding of the business may “have been grounded in experience in general management” (Walker and Lloyd-Walker, 2011b, p. 11). This would indicate a need to move employees between line and project roles or for project management education to include business management skills development including the management of budgets, systems and people.

Traditional project management skills, concentrating largely on planning and control, are still required, but people with strong technical skills now also require business management and relationship management skills to manage projects, and the people who will bring them to a successful conclusion. Project managers now commonly perform activities formerly viewed as the responsibility of HR (Legault & Chasserio, 2012). Project managers now require an understanding of why a range of HR policies and practices need to be implemented within project teams. These additional capabilities will be especially needed as project procurement form moves from traditional delivery forms toward alliancing (as discussed in Chapter 2). These changing needs involve HR and project leaders working together on activities such as workforce planning, employee performance and development, rewards, and employee health and safety.

Traditional project management education and training has not prepared project managers for this more “people management”-oriented role that devolution has created. Indeed, it was found that within engineering organizations, the way that project management was practiced had worked against achieving the desired impact of HR strategies (Clark & Colling, 2005). Devolution of decision making to line, or project, management has brought with it the possibility of increased “disparity and inconsistencies between policy formulation at senior HR level and the decisions that are taken by these managers” (McCarthy, Darcy, & Grady, 2010, p. 157). Current project management training and development is inadequate for alliance management preparation, but what is also missing is a people management system flexible enough to continue to support the rights of all employees and which ensures equality of work conditions while supporting coordination of the development of employees so all may pursue their desired career path.

As stated earlier, organizations expect much more of those now delivering alliance and other RBP forms than they expected of them when delivering traditional projects (Ezulike et al., 1997; Grimsey & Graham, 1997). It has also been established that just as HR activities are being devolved to line managers so are project managers now taking on an increasing range of activities formerly considered the domain of HR. The temporary work processes and relationships that project team formation demands of employees leads to fluctuating workloads (Turner et al., 2008) and to changes in reporting relationships. It raises questions such as with whom will the project team member or project manager have their performance review conducted, and who will ensure the project team member is made aware of career development opportunities? Who will recommend the project worker for positions that would support their career advancement? Is this the role of the project leader or the supervisor of their substantive position?

If decision-making responsibilities in relation to these issues are to be devolved to line and project managers, HR professionals will need to ensure that these managers have been provided with the necessary understanding of the issues influencing policy development and provided with the knowledge and skills required to implement the policy as intended.

As we work through the full range of forms of project procurement discussed in Chapter 2, we begin to understand that the demands on project team members, project managers and project leaders change as the choice of procurement form changes. As the need for greater collaboration and coordination increases, in particular, so are greater demands made of all project team members to develop new and different ways of working. A new set of capabilities now needs to be added to the technical knowledge and skills developed for success in traditional projects.

Selecting, Inducting and Redeploying Team Members

On traditional projects, or when forming small project internal project teams, organizations may first consider two issues: availability of staff and the fit between the individual's KSAEs and those required across the project team to achieve successful completion. On occasions, perhaps where a new IT system is being implemented and there is no employee with a high level of knowledge of the new system, expertise may be “imported” through contracting specialists to work on the team.

When selecting teams for an alliance, it is not just a matter of looking at the organization's staff profile and selecting suitable staff from within it. Alliancing requires HR and project leaders to work with otherwise competitor organizations to develop a balanced and talented staff profile for the alliance entity. This is the joint responsibility of the two or more organizations forming the alliance entity, for they stand the potential of sinking or swimming together. Strategically, learning to work with competitor organizations, therefore, is an important relationship management skill for HR staff and project managers. It acknowledges the multi-systemic situation that is created when an alliance is formed. That is, two or more sets of employee data, including performance achievements need to be considered. Another step is required, compared with staffing an internal project. Here, locating a person with related knowledge and skills who currently is not working on a project will not be sufficient.

Alliance partners come together to discuss the full range of shared responsibilities and resources, including people. Staffing an alliance involves selecting the best people from across the member organizations. This requires HR staff to communicate with one another and work together to ensure that the best possible team is assembled. On one alliance, two major construction companies were attempting to balance experience, knowledge, expertise and relationship skills through the contribution of staff from each company to match needs and ensure that gaps were not present within the alliance entity. The advantage here is that two pools of experience, knowledge, expertise and relationship skills can be drawn from despite coming from competing companies to ensure an appropriate and effective workforce within the alliance. Participant 47, (P47) an HR practitioner who worked on this alliance, said:

…you judge your capacity to be able to provide enough personnel with the right skills and at the right levels to manage the project properly and if you think you're not going to be able to do that that actually makes sense to joint venture with another group because that just increases the pool of available engineers, supervisors and other skilled people to make sure you've got coverage in all of those areas and we found at different levels that [Organization X] and [Organization Y] for instance complemented each other quite well. [Organization Y] had many more engineers at a certain level, probably at the five year level or less, but [Organization X] were able to provide some other key people in other areas that [Organization Y] would have struggled to provide. The other complicating factor is what other jobs you've got going at the moment and where you've got your other people occupied. Because…people can't work on more than one job at a time so they can't do it justice. You might have your environmental person going between projects and playing surveillance and that sort of stuff but in the set up and the initial phases of a project you need all your key people especially your leadership people 100% committed and just totally focused on getting that project off the ground and running in the right direction, otherwise, you've got problems and you spend the entire rest of the project trying to claw back that lost ground…. At [PA 1] you had [Organization X] as a civil contractor and [Organization Z] as a mechanical systems and electrical contractor and so they were complementary. [Organization X] deals with the civil parts and [Organization Z] come in and install the mechanical gear, put in the electrics, control systems and that sort of thing in, so you really did have some civil engineering teams and some process engineering teams and they'd come in and you had all these different phases of the project to build the thing first then you had to come in and install all of this gear, but you still had quite a bit of overlap, for instance, there was a [Organization X] senior electrical or process engineering manager. He was a civil engineer by trade but he had the ability to manage these teams of electrical and process engineers as well and at the end of the day it became more about his project management skills and his co-ordination ability to get things done rather than his actual expertise in the [engineering] area which should have been provided by the team members he's controlling.

Badging an alliance, ensuring that people feel part of the alliance regardless of which organization they came, from is important if the alliance is to succeed. Interviewee P47 commented: “We did some very strong branding basically to try to get people away from the mentality of…I work for A or I work for B.’ He advised that they aimed to have people feeling part of the alliance entity and going about their work abiding with the agreed code of behavior, whether that was the way they behave in their parent organization or not. P47 went on to state that they “tried as much as possible to get these teams to be multidisciplinary and multi organization…” They worked on developing an understanding that:

…you work for the X Alliance; you work for the alliance regardless of who pays you you're working under the same rules, the same behaviors, the same way you speak to your people out in the field, the same position description that you hold as a foreman or as a whatever you're employed as…And I think we were relatively successful in that.

However, it was acknowledge that some team members more quickly adapted to this environment, working cooperatively with those who, under other project forms, would have been competitors.

P47 said that the work done on developing a culture to support the stated aims and code of conduct agreed for the alliance had succeeded in creating a unique ambience within the alliance.

…it is good team building as much as you can to try to create a culture and I guess use the word ambience, it's a good word, it's the general feel of the place when you walk in in the morning are people happy, are they talking to each other…So team building workshops were good…

HR commonly supports line management to build the team skills of project team members within a single organization to support improved team performance. The development of emotional intelligence skills to complement strong technical skills has been demonstrated to improve project team performance (Rezania & Lingham, 2009; Turner & Lloyd-Walker, 2008). When creating teams within alliances, HR practitioners may need to liaise with HR and alliance leadership staff from the other alliance member organizations. P47 provided an example of how alliance organizations had employed a facilitator to work with staff from alliance member organizations to establish the culture of the temporary alliance entity:

…you do try to team build. We actually ran some cross functional team workshops to start…got a professional facilitator in to come in,…and said okay, well, you're the team that's responsible for all these areas…for each team [he asked] who are your key interface points, well, first of all who are we as a team, what do we want to achieve, what are we going to stand for as a team and talk about behaviors and attitudes and that sort of thing, what are we not going to stand for within our team, what are we not going to stand for from other teams. This is people coming together right at the start of a job, so they're really challenging questions to ask.

DeFillippi and Arthur (1998) identified the single-project organization that is dissolved when the project is completed. Alliance entities are created to deliver an agreed outcome and disbanded on completion. They may operate for a short period of time or as long as 3–5 years. Redeployment is an issue for consideration on completion of the project, as employees will return to their employing partner organization and contractors will need to negotiate a new contract with another organization, for the alliance entity no longer exists. Maintaining communication with employees throughout the life of the alliance will be important both for the individual and the organization in redeploying the employee to a suitable position, based on continued tracking of their performance and career preferences during the life of the alliance.

Employee Rewards

People management policies and procedures to ensure compliance with employment law, including health and safety, equity, and conditions such as pay must be maintained within the alliance, but how these policies and procedures are implemented in each of the partner organizations may vary. Employee rewards may encompass salaries and wages, benefits, and incentives but can often also be viewed as incorporating the provision of a safe and healthy workplace, ensuring equity and fairness.

P47 was asked: How does the HR person reconcile possible quite large differences between the HR systems within the merged companies? In his experience with a recent alliance, payroll was not changed. P47 advised “we weren't responsible for that on the project, they were paid from their parent organization.” In other instances on alliances, efforts have been made to ensure equity across similar roles with similar responsibilities. However, as pay rates are not commonly discussed, and years of experience and length of employment may impact on the current rate of pay, annual salaries may remain the responsibility of the employing partner organizations.

Employee benefits and incentives that may be visible to others on the job will need to be discussed to ensure that lack of equity of treatment does not lead to resentments and possibly interfere with cooperation, trust, and sharing. Issues such as hours of work, or work-life balance (WLB) policies may be best discussed and agreed across the alliance entity. We use a WLB example here to demonstrate how a proactive approach to health and safety, one which goes beyond compliance, can support improved employee morale and job satisfaction, and lead to project success. It can be viewed as a “benefit” provided by the organization, and act as an incentive motivating employee performance.

One of the issues we identified in our earlier research (Walker & Lloyd-Walker, 2011b; 2011c) was the high level of commitment to success that develops within an alliance. The high level of cooperation, commitment and trust that develops across team members in this project relationship form provides many positives, but it can also lead to people overcommitting their time and efforts to the detriment of other parts of their life and their health. There is the potential for issues of overwork or lack of attention to employee well-being or for those not currently falling within the traditional structures that current HR practices are designed to work within being treated less well across a range of areas than those with one reporting relationship only in a continuing role. For those choosing contracting as a career (Peel & Inkson, 2004), moving from organization to organization to take on a variety of roles within project teams, the issue of “employee wellbeing and ethical treatment” (Turner et al., 2008, p. 577) may present even greater challenges.

Project managers are provided considerable latitude in relation to decision-making power in alliancing. Legault (2005) points out that this situation could have the potential to lead to organizational policies not being fully implemented or applied as intended, and perhaps project team members being denied their workplace rights. On some projects, working extremely long hours may occur as a result of the enthusiasm team members have for bringing the project to a successful completion. This has been observed within the performing arts (Lindgren & Packendorff, 2006). Or team members may be expected to work through weekends. Indeed Clark and Colling (2005) cite Scase's (2001) investigation into the possible link between project management and the U.K.'s long-hours culture.

Regard for worker entitlements may then be “lost” when the leader driving the project to successful completion is responsible for activities formerly the purview of HR (Legault & Chasserio, 2012). In striving to meet deadlines, the needs of employees and their rightful entitlements may be overlooked. The reward, or incentive, may be perceived to be satisfaction in having met the challenge and delivered the project, or it may incorporate some financial reward according to the extent to which time lines or quality issues are met. Establishing fair and equitable rewards that do not deny employees their entitlements can require considerable effort and expertise at the planning stage.

Careful consideration of project team members’ WLB can contribute to a proactive approach to workplace health and safety and contribute to improved project performance. Lingard, Brown, Bradley, Bailey, and Townsend (2007) provided interesting insights in this regard in their research into work/life balance on the Wivenhoe dam alliance project in Queensland, Australia. The alliance team members agreed to work longer but fewer days. The location of the dam works meant that the team members lived away from home during the week and had been returning home too late on a Saturday to, for instance, see their children play sports. Changes to work hours enabled employees spend weekends with their families. The result of the new working conditions was a higher level of employee satisfaction, completion six months ahead of schedule and below the original estimated cost, despite working fewer days. This led Lingard et al. (2007, p. 813) to claim that using “traditional metrics of cost and time, the Wivenhoe Dam project was therefore a remarkable success.” This research demonstrated that alliancing, as a project procurement method, provides an environment in which HR issues, in this instance work-life balance, can be discussed, agreed, and implemented, contributing to the creation of high performance work teams in a team environment that enables open discussion, such as alliancing (Lingard et al., 2007).

Performance Management and Review Processes

Performance reviews can present some challenges even when people are working only part time on a project within their own organization. Gaining input from the project team leader may assist the supervisor to gain a better understanding of the overall performance of their direct report for the review period, however when the employee is located within a separate entity, as is the case with an alliance, maintaining contact and tracking the performance of an employee, who will in due course return to that supervisor's area, can present greater coordination demands. One example provided by an interviewee when researching on project careers was that they had an annual meeting with the supervisor of their substantive position to update them on any structural changes or future projects that may provide career opportunities and the alliance project manager provided some information on the team's and individual's overall performance to the supervisor. P47 stated that on an alliance project involving two main member organizations only (some subcontractors were also involved) performance reviews could present some issues:

When it comes to performance reviews we had the issue, the big issue that we felt, okay, I'm a B Company team member I report to an A Company person, that A person reports here to a PO person or something or other or a combination. A person doesn't know B's reporting process or performance arrangement process so how are they going to affectively give me a performance review every six months and it might be reversed too of course, or,…they might favour the other three A people…on the team versus the one or two B people or vice versa…. for the most part yes, there's an organization requirement from each of their partners to use their own process because they still need to manage the on-going performance and development of their team members because otherwise there's a risk of putting their team members out on the project that they're going to lose them because they're not managed effectively or they can't guarantee they are, or, this person perceives that they've been cut off from the performance or the development opportunities that come within the organization they work for.

Concluding Comments

HR has a role to play in alliancing. This involvement may take different shapes and forms, according to the needs of a specific alliance team. As part of our research we spoke with groups, including a group of HR managers from project-based and project-oriented organizations, separate from the 50 participants interviewed for the main study reported upon in this book. Of the 23 practitioners present at one presentation, only one HR manager commented that it was necessary to speak with the alliance leadership team to determine what they required of HR to support successful involvement in the alliance. Another HR manager commented that their organization had recently been involved in an alliance where the member organizations decided that in order to support creating the desired alliance culture and to ensure equity and fairness across all participants, an HR consultant would be employed to work on policies and procedures to guide people management within the alliance entity and maintain contact with partner organization HR departments.

How HR should be configured to support operations in project-intensified industries and organizations and how this alters the KSAEs required of HR personnel in these organizations is a matter for further research. Preparation of project managers to perform the increased range of activities for which they are now held responsible is also another area requiring more research. The development of project leaders suitable for all relationship forms will require HR involvement to ensure that the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and expertise required to succeed across the full range of RBP forms is available within or to the organization, using permanent or temporary, contract, employees.

Because HR departments tend not to intervene in the project manager/employee relationship (Bredin and Söderlund, 2011b) on a range of issues, including hours of work and applying the organization-wide WLB policies, project managers will require guidance to ensure equity and fairness. Clark and Colling (2005) found that in engineering organizations there was the potential for “highly specific project management practices” to constrain the impact of HR strategies. The suggestions by several researchers [including Bredin, Huemann, Keegan, Legault, Söderlund, and others] in the area shows that new ways of analyzing these issues and new frameworks for managing within project intensified industries is, thus, well justified and needed.

Competency Classification

Within the context of this book, what do we mean by competencies and capabilities? This section will provide discussion and framing of three sets of competencies that are important to gaining a better understanding of what is required of teams undertaking projects that expect a relationship based project delivery approach.

Hoffmann (1999, p. 276) undertook a literature review of the terms relating to personal competencies and found no single accepted consensus on what the term meant. He found three dominating themes: observable performance; the standard or quality of the outcome of the person's performance; and the underlying attributes of a person. He concluded that to enable performance standards to be defined and proscribe competencies, two questions need to be asked—what needs to be done, and how well does it need to be done? Much of the competence frameworks we will discuss do this.

We do, however, express reservations and qualifications concerning the concept of competency standards. The term competency is somewhat minimalist. It expresses the bare minimum needed to do something and that is not a strong basis for achieving sustainable human capital or sound relationship building. Competence is similar to compliance in the earlier discussion in this chapter on commitment (Meyer & Allen, 1991). Most alliances agreements and literature, for example, term business-as-usual (BAU) behaviors and abilities as unacceptably low and expect best-for-project attitudes. Therefore, we view competencies as minimum standards to describe various levels of attainment. Perhaps capabilities would be a better term to use, as it implies a range of abilities that assumes competence as being the base level platform of ability. It is interesting to note that guides such as the PMI Competency Development Framework (PMI, 2007) refers to competencies rather than capabilities. We aim in this book to identify gaps in that framework, and so we primarily refer to competencies but also discuss how that base level can be extended to a level of excellence.

Organizational competencies refer to organization's set of abilities (Prahalad & Hamel, 1990) and for many firms, their successful competencies and routines actually inhibit them exploring new boundaries (Leonard-Barton, 1992) because it makes them myopic (Levinthal & March, 1993). Firms and individuals who focus on what they are good at can miss understanding what they need to be good at to meet the expectation of a client/customer/collaborator's value proposition, what the really want (Anderson et al., 2006). We stress the need for understanding what is really needed and expected, not what is the minimum that can be offered to comply.

This leads us to focus on knowledge and skills that build the intellectual foundation of reflection. Thus, we consider the Dreyfus (2004) model that offers a five-stage model of professional expertise development, and combined this with the Cicmil (2003; 2006, p. 35) model that further developed this application of the model to PM skills development. This model is useful for this chapter because it illustrates a defined level of PM background technical and PM-related knowledge and sophistication. For example, Table 5 suggests that the novice and advanced beginner-level project managers might be well qualified, having gained much theoretical knowledge but have limited experiential knowledge to reflect upon which we have shown to be critical in RBP situations. Further, their ability to advance from this level to higher levels of knowledge and expertise (proficient performer or expert) is limited by their capacity, ability, and environmental conditions to reflect upon experience based on their ability to theorize and through reflection, and consolidate their knowledge and this is enhanced by exposure to RBP forms of project delivery. These last two levels push project managers’ expertise beyond technical skills toward political and human relationship skills, where their ability to use reflection transforms their deep understanding of cause and effect links to inform their actions.

Proficient performer/expert level requires a broader understanding of relevant theoretical concepts and an ability to apply them to relevant experiences to build reflexive mental models that can be instantly called upon when needed. This level of proficiency is built through participating in organizational learning opportunities such as CoPs and other forms of social capital building, which is perhaps more important to RBP projects that traditional BAU projects. A lack of knowledge and ability to reflect could be caused by an absence of the necessary theoretical and methodological knowledge of how to reflect and undertake reflective research. Limits could be institutional or systemic so that the PM organization does not facilitate and perhaps even hinders reflection. This illustrates how RBP approaches can enhance OL and competency development.

Level	Experience	Real-Time Action in Context is Driven by
Novice	Faces a given problem and a given situation for the first time	Instructions (training courses, PMBOK® Guide) Learning to recognize objective facts about and characteristics of the situation (models and definitions of project) Learned generalized rules for all similar situations on the basis of identified facts, thus context-independent (project management methodology, procedures) Evaluation of the performance of the skills on the basis of how well the learned rules are followed
Advanced beginner	Has gained some real-life experience	Learning to recognize relevant elements in relevant situations on the basis of their similarities with previous examples (e.g., awareness of a typology of projects) The awareness of the importance of the context of experience; thus making a choice about what are the key elements of the given situation, in addition to context-independent rules (learning from experience, limited reflection, PMBOK® Guide recommendations) Trial-and-error
Competent performer	Amount of experience increases and the number of recognizable learned elements and facts becomes overwhelming	Learning from own experience and from others to prioritize elements of the situation Organizing information by choosing a goal and a plan Dealing only with a set of key factors relevant to the goal and plan, thus simplifying the task and obtaining improved results Deliberation about the consequences of using own judgment in relation to the given goal and plan (simultaneous subjectivity and objectivity), the relationship of involvement between performer and environment The model of analytical, proficient performer: Elements-rules-goals-plans-decision Ability to think on one's feet (confidence, reflection, choice of action, and risk taking)
Proficient performer	Away from cognitivist, analytical rationality (rules, principles, and universal solutions) toward perceiving situations rapidly, intuitively, holistically, visually, bodily, relationally	The awareness of interpretation and judgment involved in such decision making, rather than logical information processing and analytical problem solving only Understanding of the situation on the basis of prior actions and experience, acts as deeply “involved-in-the-world” manager/performer who already knows Reflective understanding and participation in power relations
Expert or virtuoso		Reflective learning; simultaneous thinking and doing Intuitive, synchronous understanding of the situation, with an overarching participative critical reflection of the self and the group The thought, body, knowledge, and action are inseparable, are simultaneously forming and are being formed by one another; Understanding that power relating is an intrinsic part of intersubjective relating, always there Considerations for the present and deliberations about the future

Table 5.   PM Expertise, Competence and Knowledge (Source Walker, Cicmil, Thomas, Anbari, & Bredillet, 2008a, p. 23)

Developing PM professionals at the novice level can be effectively accomplished at the workplace through on-the-job training, short courses, and training programs, which are part of the KPIs and KRAs seen in project alliancing. As the skill level moves from novice toward advanced beginner and beyond, emphasis is placed (consciously or instinctively) on combining theoretical knowledge with practical experience and reconciling how gaps affect performance. RBP forms achieve this through mentoring and coaching. Novices and advanced beginners widen their repertoire of potential responses to situations through broadening their frames of reference beyond their current experience, which requires a supportive PM delivery form environment. At this stage, they may then best benefit from extensive networking and communication with others at their skill level or higher. Opportunities for this are prevalent in alliance projects. This may enable novices to use learned explicit knowledge and reframe it based on the experience gained that generated tacit knowledge. This can then be internalized and reformulated in more flexible and reflexive routines and approaches to cope with ambiguity and complexity. This is where a no-blame environment that is characteristic of alliancing is essential (Walker, Lloyd-Walker, & Mills, 2013b) because it allows people to make mistakes, acknowledge them, learn from them, and turn the experience into a valuable learning episode rather than merely an error to be buried and forgotten about. Project alliance learning KPIs play a useful role in providing the environment, means, intellectual support and “safe playground” for people to experiment, fail (if necessary), learn from feedback, self-critique, and reflect to fast-track building experience and moving toward being competent and perhaps proficient performers.

Reflective learning is of value at all levels of expertise. At the “novice” level, we can see that potential to gain from reflecting upon experience is likely to produce a shallow result simply because many situations are encountered for the first time, therefore, these do not offer the opportunity for any action learning feedback. We can see from this model that RBP can produce valuable collaborative synergy. How does this relate to accepted professional PM institutional frameworks? The next sections provide some insights.

PMI Competency Framework

The PMI's Project Management Competency Development (PMCD) Framework 2^nd Edition (2007) is an extensive set of guidelines and requirements that describe the role and competency needs of project management teams undertaking project work. It is aligned with the PMI standards and guides based on a particular view of “relevant knowledge” such as A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) (PMI, 2008) and also describes some of the PM-related competencies required of program and portfolio management positions, as envisaged by the PMI standards for those roles (PMI, 2006a; 2006b). It is by nature limited by what the PM professional associations perceive is “relevant knowledge.” The PMBOK® Guide and the competency framework are useful for certification purposes, reflecting PM knowledge as proscribed by the PMBOK® Guide. However, as Morris, Jamieson, and Shepherd (2006) highlight the PMI's sister organization, the U.K.-based Association for Project Management (APM), Body of Knowledge 5^th Edition (2006) shares similar limitations to that of the PMI's PMBOK® Guide.

Professional associations such as PMI and APM have a strong practitioner tradition, and their volunteers who help develop and vet any competency framework are doing so from a normative and shared ontology that these standards and expectations are “facts,” whereas they are socially constructed. Some of the standards are based on academic research and some are based on tradition. This leaves these competency standards potentially backward-looking, or at best “in-the-moment” looking, being framed by the worldview of a volunteer group that has more of a great focus on current and past practice than speculating on the future. The purpose of these standards are to reflect current practice expectations, as they are generally linked to accreditation and examination processes and it would be unfair to expect practitioners to prepare themselves with capabilities that may or may not be in immediate demand.

There is also danger that fads may creep into competency frameworks that are difficult to exclude later, particularly if a constituency evolves that has a vested interest in these fads. Abrahamson (1996) wrote an influential paper on the emergence and dangers of management fads. Whitty (2005; 2009; 2011; Whitty & Maylor, 2007) has also written about the development of PM trends and fads around perceptions of complexity and how current practice can blind us to the competencies that are really needed to prepare professionals for current and future challenges, including inclusion of the many industry sectors that currently do not currently recognize PM practice. This problem is not restricted to professional qualifications, as the education literature also draws our attention to problems associated with curriculum development to prepare present and future project managers when dominated by paradigms of the past (Bennis & O'Toole, 2005; Crawford, Morris, Thomas, & Winter, 2006). There is also a dilemma of how to best integrate theory and practice in competency development (Berggren & Söderlund, 2008; Raelin, 2007) and to value reflective practice as a key competency.

The PMI (2007) Competency Framework has a focus and is structured around the PMI-defined project life cycle processes of initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and finally closing. It has a well-structured approach that splits the processes into elements, and then performance criteria and evidence that needs to support evaluation of that competence. However, despite its logic and usefulness in general terms, it does not specify how these elements and performance criteria should be met or how these outputs should be measured. Figure 19 illustrates the procurement performance criteria as an example.

Thirty separate competencies are identified. The “2.0 planning a project” performance competency, for example, defines 10 separate units of that element. The unit “2.9 Procurement plan agreed” is one of those 10 in that life cycle elements. This performance criterion has five components of analysis material requirement evidenced by the project procurement plan and bill of materials, and as illustrated in Figure 19. However, as is evident from the framework, there is little to guide a PM team member on how to discern between an excellent or poor project procurement plan other than by reference back to the PMBOK® Guide (PMI, 2008), and that is not sufficiently expansive in its explication of how to produce a procurement plan to be definitive. Other definitional gaps are evident. For example, how should a plan accommodate concepts such as best value or value for money and how does this fit together with, for example, a form of gateway system suggested by MacDonald (2011). This lack of detail hinders assessment, which must, as a consequence, be subjective and neither uniform nor consistent.

The framework also includes six personal competences (PMI, 2007, p. 24) to provide background their technical and PM knowledge as follows:

1. Effective communication, defined as using suitable methods for accurate, appropriate, and relevant communication with stakeholders;
2. Leading, defined as guiding, inspiring and motivating stakeholders to manage and overcome issues to achieve project objectives;
3. Managing, which is defined as administering and deploying resources;
4. Cognitive ability, defined as having depth of perception, discernment, and judgment to direct a project within a dynamic and evolving environment;
5. Effectiveness, producing desired results using appropriate deployment of resources, tools and techniques; and
6. Professionalism, defined as conforming to ethical behavior governed by responsibility, respect, honestly, and fairness in practicing PM.

These are explained more fully, and Figure 20 illustrates an example for the communication personal competency.

Each of the 25 personal competencies has associated performance criteria and types of evidence. Figure 20 illustrates the four communication competencies and their performance criteria and types of evidence.

What becomes clear is that the paradigm, worldview, driving these competence standards is highly positivist and instrumental. PM, as the professions have seen it for decades, is more of a science than an art, but that view is changing to PM being seen as a craft and art (Smith, 2007; Smith & Winter, 2010). Morris (2011) points out PM has evolved from an operations research (planning and scheduling, optimising resources etc.) basis to a strategic implementation activity that is intensely people-oriented. Traditional PM-espoused values concern containing uncertainty, planning and control, and belief in an ability to optimise. Most of the PM discipline's short history has been centered on designing a problem solution, using design drawings for visualization and representing the project to enable components and constituent parts to be numerically measured and their integration and assembly to be predicted in plans. This has led to PM training and education to be highly technically and process oriented, based on its internal research and practice development in a way that has been referred to as trained technicians (Crawford et al., 2006). As PM embraced not only the IT sector but also “soft” sectors such as professional services, events management, public administration delivery, and scientific exploitation such as pharmaceuticals, it became evident that many projects were combinations of technology, systems integration, and service delivery, with a great focus on how people deliver project outputs and outcomes. It also became clear that PM has a strategic dimension and that its aim is to deliver on strategy, thus having a strong institutional purpose (Morris & Geraldi, 2011, Morris & Jamieson, 2004).

The rethinking PM research network deliberations (Winter & Smith, 2006) led to a different way of conceptualizing what PM is really about. This work, together with that of Hodgson and Cicmil and their colleagues who contributed to a landmark book (Hodgson & Cicmil, 2006), highlighted the need for project management reflective practitioners (Winter et al., 2006) and for PM knowledge and competencies to be broadened. Others in Scandinavia were reconceptualizing PM as ways of organizing work in temporary organizations and so had a focus on organizational and business delivery terms (Artto & Kujala, 2008; Artto et al., 2008; Lundin & Söderholm, 1995; Packendorff, 1995). PM was also perceived in terms of projects not only being undertaken by project-based organizations but by managing business through projects (Gareis, 1989; Turner, 2000; Turner, 2006). These contextual observations introduced the need for business knowledge, skills, and attributes of people as working in project competencies. Taking a view of PM as systems integration of complex products and services (Davies & Brady, 2000; Davies et al., 2005) led to additional competence requirement insights. Additionally, as has been highlighted earlier, projects when seen as learning vehicles (Brady & Davies, 2004) in project-based organizations (Koskinen, 2009; 2010; 2012) add competencies required related to KM and OL. Books such as Smith (2007) and Winter and Szczepanek (2009), with their use of metaphor, broadening the scope and scale of project work, highlight the need for PM team skills to be far more extensive for the more complex projects seen frequently today than the instrumental and more rigid view of PM requirements for skills, knowledge, attributes and experience.

Taking this broader perspective of PM and how it is evolving from the literature cited above, we can see that competencies, knowledge bases, and perceptions of PM and what PM practitioners need as personal competences have moved far beyond the PMI Competency Development Framework (PMI, 2007).

Alliancing Association of Australasia (AAA) Profiling Professional Excellence

This section draws upon an independent study for the AAA that relied upon extensive PA literature, several recent Australasian studies on PAs (predominately undertaken in Australia), and others elsewhere, as well as results from a recent research project undertaken with the Australasian Alliancing Association in which 17 Alliance professionals, including 11 project alliance managers (AMs) and 3 unit managers to whom the AMs report, were interviewed. The study generated 131 hours of taped interviews and over 250 pages of transcription that were analyzed using NVivo with a grounded theory approach to make sense of the results. Results were used to develop a profile of the skills, attributes, and experience needed of AMs and the framework developed to differentiate between new and inexperienced AMs, emerging proficient and expert levels of preparedness for the AM role. A capability maturity model was developed to not only profile AM stages of development but to also be used as a developmental tool by those pursuing careers in alliancing. While results may be specific to Australasia and for AMs, the profile and results presented may form the basis for wider application, because it incorporates the broad range of KSAE required of project managers in new and evolving RBP forms discussed in this book.

Earlier in our discussion on partnering and alliancing forms in Chapter 2, under forms of project procurement, we highlighted an institutional differentiation between project alliancing and partnering. Bresnan and Marshall (2011) argue that there is a prevailing industry experience-logic that has institutionalized highly competitive behaviors in the construction industry. This has caused many of the ills highlighted by Egan (1998) and Latham (1994). On the positive side, partnering has been institutionalized as a service-logic with commitment to a customer focus. An analysis by Murray and Langford (2003) of a series of reports into the U.K. construction industry conducted since 1944 indicates a cultural shift under which the industry is demonstrating a genuine desire to turn its back on the past and at least to seriously consider the value of closer relationship-based procurement approaches. In Australia, a similar trend, starting with the “No Dispute” report (NBCC, 1989), led to a more recent move toward the current situation where, according to a recent report (Wood and Duffield, 2009, p. 7), “The total value of alliance projects in the road, rail and water sectors in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia, over the period 2004 to 2009 was $32 billion.” This represents a significant institutional shift in attitudes and practice that is a necessary precursor to acceptance of partnering and alliancing. Therefore, POs as institutionally being represented by major corporations and government clients, together with the consultants and contracting firms representing NOPs to an alliance, all have now oriented their focus on the need for a best-for-project culture being both desirable and necessary for project alliances.

The AAA study (Walker & Lloyd-Walker, 2011a; 2011b; 2011c) resulted in the AM's knowledge, skills, attributes and experience (KSAE) model illustrated in Figure 21. It categorizes KSAE into “hard” core competency baseline knowledge and skills, which are necessary for project team members and leaders. These relate to the technical business such as IT, construction/engineering, aerospace, or professional services, change management, and other emerging fields of operational/organizational endeavor that are managing their business by and through projects. This also categorizes baseline experience: in the technical context; managing projects; the organizational context; systems integration within cross-disciplinary teams; working in cross-cultural (business as well as nation) teams; experience in recovery from crises or distressed projects; and being exposed to the need to engage in system and holistic thinking.

This prompts the need to understand what a PA requires of an AM to fulfil its goals. Alliancing implies that there are additional or different KSAEs required for managing project alliances compared to more traditionally procured construction infrastructure projects. Knowledge is embodied in processes, texts, and papers, and tacitly through lived practice. Skills gained from formal and informal knowledge acquisition and training are acquired though study and apprenticeship. Attributes are personality traits that are innate, developed, or adopted from role models. Experience represents practice and learning from reflection on practice. Arguably, this experience requires “soft skills” categorized as personal attributes and values that lead to building and maintaining relationships. These include having the personal attributes and having values that support being trustworthy and committed, being flexible and open minded, developing emotional intelligence, developing a repertoire of divergent and convergent thinking, being motivated and building self-confidence as well as developing the confidence in others, developing authority and being able to influence, developing clear strategic thinking and systems thinking, and being innovation-seeking. Authentic leadership has been identified as an important “soft skill” as detailed in some depth by Lloyd-Walker and Walker (2011). Briefly, this is about being able to inspire confidence; being consistent in espoused and practiced behaviors and actions; have exceptional communication abilities to be able to clearly state positions, intensions, plans, and expected performance; having a relational focus in which there is genuine connection and engagement with people within teams and external stakeholders; having resilience and being adaptable; and demonstrating emotional intelligence.

We also showed underpinning values for a collaborative RBP form of triple bottom line (3BL) discussed through this book thus far, together with valuing collaboration as a business operational paradigm. We also observed in our AAA research the existence of advanced business-level skills that one normally finds in high-level executives who can comprehend and discern the project purpose.

Because we are also interested in how AMs develop KSAE, we used a capability maturity model (CMM) approach adapted from existing CMM models (Judgev & Thomas, 2002; Paulk, Curtis, Chrisses, & Weber, 1993; PMI, 2003) and the concept of maturity development in professionals from novice to expert virtuoso (Cicmil, 2003; Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 2005) and illustrated in Table 5, as well as reference to work on PM competencies (Dainty, Cheng, & Moore, 2005; Lopez-Cabrales, Valle, & Herrero, 2006; PMI, 2007). This literature framework led to the development of a four level maturity profile of AMs.

The four-level AM profile comprises 1) foundational, 2) nascent, 3) developing intermediate, and 4) mature experienced levels. Foundational AMs are comfortable and highly competent in structured traditional “tame” situations (Hancock, 2010) and may be proficient in briefing and scoping to help narrow down operational options. They need to have divergent thinking and an appetite for ambiguity to be able to influence team thinking to consider wider approaches, more innovation, etc. They may, however, lack confidence in prompting divergent thinking and have some limitations in recognizing and understanding some of the systems that problems and situations are located in. They may be recent graduates, new to the role and under close tutelage, perhaps in an acting role or assistant AM role. They have as a “given” high-level knowledge of the technology dominating the PA scope.

Nascent AMs recognize how technical systems interact with other systems in messy situations (Hancock, 2010). They have good convergent thinking and are capable of encouraging divergent thinking. They have as a “given” high levels of baseline traditional project management knowledge, skills, and experience. Developing Intermediate AMs can effectively use divergent thinking to see innovative solutions and to be able to switch to convergent thinking. They may still be uncomfortable with or unable to be effortlessly effective in highly messy situations. They are good systems thinkers and have wide enough experience to be aware of systems and subsystems that nascent AMs would miss. They have as a “given” high levels of advanced project management knowledge, skills, and experience, with well-tuned “people-related” skills such as stakeholder engagement. Mature Experienced AMs have true helicopter vision of situations and so are confident to act-sense-respond in highly messy situations. The defining difference is their ability to effortlessly move from systems to real worldviews, trigger divergent thinking in others, be able to achieve rapid and effective reflection, sensemaking, and consequence-coping strategies so that they can successfully turn highly messy situations into complex situations (Hancock, 2010), and then simplify them into tame and routine situations. They often have advanced chief executive officer or board-level general management experience. It is this higher level of working confidently that we believe separates top-level from mid-level AMs. This also fits with complexity aspects discussed in Chapter 3.

The AAA study revealed three main “hard” knowledge and experience-based skills and seven ‘softer’ knowledge and attributes that are explained in more detail in Table 6 that further detail and explain the content of Figure 21. The application and development of these is enhanced through reflection on practice.

The CMM framework illustrated in Table 6 was subject to further reflection by the authors over mid- 2011 to 2012 and based on testing and advice from two senior academic experts in this area and four senior project director-level PM professionals. The aim of this reflection was to explore the usefulness of a fundamental framework of dimensions describing expected project team behaviors that could be developed to improve our understanding of what is expected of teams to justify why one procurement form may be suitably deployed over another. Such a framework could help us better understand similarities and differences with procurement choice labels used around the globe.

The aim of the framework is to guide PORs to more effectively choose a project delivery procurement option that facilitates the required team behaviors to deliver their project. The behavioral framework is based upon a set of assumptions.

1. That the PO and POR have an intimate knowledge of the PO organization's business strategy and context but may need to collaborate with and access knowledge from an experienced contractor at the business development idea DG0 point in Phase 1 of Figure 2. The POR is most likely the best person to also lead Phase 2 with close knowledge of, and support from, the PO organization to guide the development of concepts in Phase 2. However, the POR may have insufficient depth of knowledge of the uncertainty and risks associated with project realization solutions. The POR will rely on both organizational internal expert advice and external consultant knowledge to bridge the POR's knowledge gaps. As Williams et al. (2009) point out, the concept stage is one where there is scant information available, and this presents both uncertainty and complexity in foreseeing likely consequences of assumptions being made. In many cases, various forms of ECI would bridge the PORs and Figure 2 Phase 2 team's knowledge gaps, but for this to happen requires collaborative behaviors between the POR and non-owner project team participants (NOPs).
2. The project risk literature (Ward, 1997; 1999; Ward & Chapman, 2003) clearly indicates that teams with advanced knowledge and understanding of likely risks and uncertainty should be sourced for complex and complicated projects to identify both a justifiable and realistic contingency for risk and uncertainty. These teams should also plan how to manage that contingency to avoid it being wasted or misused.
3. Much of the project complexity issues to be addressed primarily relate to people's behaviors and ability to collaborate rather than to resolve purely technical issues. There is a great need for stakeholder engagement on projects these days (Das, 2005; Holzer, 2008; Mitchell, Agle, & Wood, 1997). A focus on team interaction is vital. Team members need to understand behavioral expectations.
4. It is well known that the PO and POR sophistication is a vital factor in project success (Cherns & Bryant, 1984; Latham, 1994; Walker, 1996; 1998). Their ability to collaborate with NOPs, to be able to question and reflect on assumptions and be open to (and able to engage with) NOPs on solution building is a critical skill.
5. Sophisticated POs and PORs and (NOPs) know how to collaborate, communicate and productively and collegially exercise authority to ensure that responsibility and accountability are appropriately allocated.

Based on the above five assumptions, we reflected on our past research and the literature and we proposed 10 dimensions of POR and NOP behavioral characteristics measured using a 7-point scale, with 1 = very low and 7 = very high (Walker and Lloyd-Walker, 2012b, p. 882–883).

1. Coping with Project Design Instability—extent to which the POR and NOPs cope with design solutions that are ambiguous, incomplete, or have conflicting objectives that hinder realistic project delivery bids to be developed and tendered upon that reflect the PO's prioritized objectives.
2. Coping with Context Complexity—extent to which the project context presents structural, technical, directional, temporal, or relational complexity in developing design solutions to deliver the project. Need for taking a range of perspectives and applying sensemaking to understand the internal/external and political environment.
3. Embracing Risk and Uncertainty - extent to which the POR and NOPs have the willingness, ability in terms of knowledge, skills, attributes and experience (KSAE), and capacity (institutional support delivered through the procurement approach and governance system adopted) to embrace uncertainty and potential risk/opportunity in developing project design and delivery strategies.
4. Challenging the Status Quo - extent to which the POR and NOPs have the willingness, ability (in terms of KSAE), and capacity (institutional support delivered through the procurement approach and governance system adopted) to embrace an open mind in interpreting and re-interpreting the project brief.
5. Balanced Performance Value Position - extent to which the POR is willing and able to clarify which benefits the project vision and aims are required to deliver in both tangible and intangible value performance terms.
6. Ensuring Mutual Trust - extent to which the POR and NOPs are willing and able to develop and maintain trust in each other to deliver agreed project performance outcomes as being the prime and overarching priority.
7. Commitment to Best-for-Project Orientation - extent to which the POR and NOPs structure contractual arrangements toward a best-for-project outcome and avoid opportunistic advantage seeking behavior.
8. Commitment to Consensus-Based Decision Making - extent to which the POR and NOPs have the willingness, ability and capacity to work collaboratively and make strategic and major project delivery decisions that all parties take equal responsibility for in committing to engender a no-blame project culture.
9. Commitment to Knowledge and Ideas Sharing - extent to which the POR and NOPs have the willingness, ability and capacity to raise and discuss ideas within a safe environment to share knowledge about project design and delivery issues to deliver best-for-project process/product innovation.
10. Commitment to an Integrated Organizational Structure - extent to which the POR and NOPs develop organizational structure/procedures to lead and manage the project through an integrated POR/NOP mechanism binding POR and NOPs into a coherent collaborative structure (both physical and virtual).

Before concluding this section we would like to comment further on the need for mature experienced alliance managers. We do this in terms of the PM expertise framework based on the Dreyfus (2004) model that offers a five stage model of professional expertise development refined by Cicmil (2003; 2006, p. 35) into the model of PM skills development presented in Table 5 and links to AM KSAE illustrated in Figure 21. Specifically, analysis from the AAA study and a number of quotes from senior AMs cited in Walker and Lloyd-Walker (2011c, p. 56–62) indicate the need for those considered to be expert or high level AMs possessing what we refer to as “board-level business communication and influencing skills.” At the same time that our study was published, another, by a French-based team of researchers funded by PMI was also published in which project managers as senior executives were studied (Debourse & Archibald, 2011a; 2011b). The study involved 22 face-to-face interviews with senior executives from the USA, Canada, Brazil, France, the U.K., and Ukraine, and a web-based survey undertaken in both English and French that captured 445 responses. Their report makes for fascinating reading and like ours, draws similar conclusions. Based on these two studies, we argue that our AM characteristics/attributes CMM model illustrated in Table 6 may be applied to a broader range of RBP approaches.

Innovation Competencies

Organizational learning, organizational behavior, motivation theory and innovation theory help us make sense of how collaboration can lead to innovation that adds value when compared to BAU conditions. We have already discussed in this chapter all the separate elements of innovation except innovation itself. Slaughter (1998) categorizes innovation as incremental or radical, incremental innovation including continuous improvement through exploiting existing knowledge skills and experience. According to Walker and Hampson (2003c, p. 238), innovation is “an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption” or “a decision-making process to enact change in technology, process, services rendered or other management approaches.” It can involve reconfiguring a component or redesigning it, redesigning a configuration of components within a system or redesigning and reconfiguring links between systems. All innovation can lead to unintended consequences and uncertain outcomes. Radical innovation involves changing nimbly and rapidly to cope with, and perhaps benefit from, turbulence, disruptive change, and present danger to the status quo.

Parent, Roy, and St-Jacques (2007) describe a dynamic knowledge transfer capacity (DKTC) model that is useful for adaptation to help us better understand the integration of collaboration with innovation for beneficial change. Their model has a generative capacity element based on knowledge discovery linked to a disseminative capacity based on diffusion linked to adsorptive capacity based on ability to apply and use new knowledge to advantage leading to an adaptive and responsive capacity. All this occurs within an environment of knowledge availability and need. In a study on innovation in construction firms adopting RBP practices, Chen, Manley, and Lewis (2012) hypothesize learning capability as being shaped by three forces: exploratory learning, exploitative learning, and transformative learning. Explorative learning is about knowledge identification, articulation, and acquisition. Exploitative learning is shaped by knowledge internalization, transformation, and application. These two themes—exploration and exploitation—are well grounded (March, 1991) and have formed the basis for recent scholarly work on innovation and knowledge transfer (Brady & Davies, 2004). However, being able to identify, disseminate, and harvest knowledge is necessary but insufficient for innovation diffusion as has been discussed earlier in this chapter. Organizations need to overcome barriers to sticky knowledge, to enhance fluidity and flow of knowledge through having a sufficient appetite and requisite resources for enacting innovation. The use of collaboration that includes action learning in which reflection, translation of shared knowledge into plans of action, and transformation of plans into action is a necessary platform, along with the ability to absorb innovative ideas to enable innovation to be embedded in routines, values, and culture in general.

Figure 22 illustrates an adaption of the DKTC model to illustrate innovation by and through collaboration.

Figure 22 illustrates an action-based model to not only develop innovative processes, products, service routines, and strategies, but to embed them within the organizations participating in the collaboration. The capability and capacity to undertake innovation and effectively transfer knowledge about the actual innovation and its diffusion can be linked into the capability maturity model (CMM) form used widely these days in information systems and ICT, for example as developed by Paulk et al. (1993) and PMI (2003) with their Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3), and developed as a conceptual model in gaining a knowledge advantage (Walker, 2004). Part of this model illustrating a CMM for sensemaking and its contribution to the knowledge advantage is illustrated and explained in Walker and Nogeste (2008, p. 203–204).

CMM models tend to segregate maturity as moving along five levels of maturity, for example Paulk et al. (1993) use: (1) initial, (2) repeatable, (3) defined, (4) managed, and (5) optimized. Walker (2004; 2008, p. 203–204) use (1) inactive awareness, (2) pre-active initiation, (3) active adoption, (4) pro-active acceptance and adaptation, and (5) embedded routinization. We offer a suggested CMM based on the CMM approach described above in RLP projects for innovation and collaboration, in Table 7 below.

Table 7 represents a suggested approach to assessing a CMM for the way that collaboration within RBP projects create and develop innovative products, processes, and approaches, and how they share knowledge about these innovations. The first level suggests highly ad hoc and isolated examples of project team groups that are locked in “silo thinking” within, so that when innovation emerges it happens by chance or by the efforts of a few pioneers, but knowledge about how innovation emerged is quickly lost. Level 2 represents attempts to pilot and test how innovation emerges and represents wider group knowledge, but any innovation diffusion is likely to be limited and poorly systemized and so never enters any wider culture due to the stickiness of the innovation knowledge. Level 3 indicates that innovation is systemically encouraged, knowledge about it is transferred within the firm (and/or within cross-team project participants) and the knowledge has some “half-life” to be passed onto other situations and projects. Level 4 illustrates a more systematic way to ensure that participating project teams and parent companies gain value from knowledge about the innovation, its context and impact. The final Level 5 represents a somewhat ideal state where the whole industry sector has the ability and means to nurture innovation and its diffusion throughout the sector. Here, not only individual firms benefit, but clients/project owners and society in general gain benefit from a more effective and productive industry sector.

This CMM section is closely tied to earlier sections in this chapter where the mechanism of human behavioral impact is explained. We should add that technical advances also have a part to play in our understanding of innovation created and sustained through teams collaborating on problem solving and on developing more effective ways to deliver projects. Levels 3, 4, and 5 would benefit, for example, from compatible information processing systems such as building information modally (BIM) that has much to offer in allowing compatible information and knowledge about that information to be easily transferred (Aranda-Mena et al., 2009; Cohen, 2010; Radosavljevic & Bennett, 2012). Social capital and shared language, co-location and close team interactions all can help to improve innovation and knowledge diffusion.

Chapter 4 Summary

In this chapter we have focused upon the human behavior of individuals working within teams and across multi-teams in a collaborative context. We discussed trust and commitment and the nature of co-learning through collaboration as linked elements that are core to RBP expectations and indeed, this discussion helped to frame KSAEs required of effective participants in RBP project teams. We also provided a short section on strategic HRM issues, because it is critical to contextualize the recruitment, selection, and, importantly, development, of project team participants. We also added a short discussion on the transitioning of people within RBP project teams because there is often a flow of people between BAU and RMP projects and within RBP project forms, and the way that people transition between projects is important for them as developing human beings as well as for the project sectors they contribute to so that valuable talent, knowledge, and capabilities are not lost.

The previous section dealt with important aspects of competency frameworks and classifications. We drew upon the PMI competency development framework (PMI, 2007), which provides valuable models of how to describe capabilities and levels of attainment required of project managers. The AAA profiles of project alliance manager KSAE illustrated in Table 6 (Walker & Lloyd-Walker, 2011a; 2011b; 2011c) provide a more detailed CMM model that can be used to better manage people's careers in RBP projects. More specifically, the AAA CMM is designed for project alliancing. The CMM of collaborative innovation presented in Table 7 illustrates in a course-grained manner, including suggested levels of KSAE required at the five levels of maturity of people working within a collaborative forums such a project alliance, projects that have partnering arrangements, or more closely integrated supply chains such as that that was evident on London Heathrow Terminal 5 (Doherty, 2008).

This chapter concludes discussion of the salient literature and leads into Chapter 5, which explains our research approach and methodology for the study as well as the research findings.