Concentrated or Dispersed: The Effects of Subcontracting Organizational Arrangements on Construction Project Resilience

Abstract

Construction project deliveries are confronted with various unprecedented challenges and disruptions in today’s dynamic business environment, including external disturbances and internal discontinuity, but previous studies have paid little attention to project resilience and its antecedents. Subcontracting is an important way of tackling construction project disruptions, but many subcontracting decisions made by general contractors have turned out to fail to achieve the desired goals. This study investigates the effects of subcontracting organizational arrangements of general contractors, i.e., subcontracting dispersion, on construction project resilience, including proactive resilience and reactive resilience. Besides, the social network perspective is employed to explain the aforementioned effects in consideration of the significance of the network-level features for project resilience. In particular, this study scrutinizes the mediating role of two core features of subcontracting networks—strength and openness. Questionnaire data were collected from Chinese general contractors. The questionnaire items were adopted from previous studies and were finalized based on semistructured interviews and a pilot study. The empirical analyses show that subcontracting dispersion enhances proactive resilience while exerting no significant effects on reactive resilience. The mediating analyses show that subcontracting network openness plays a mediating role in the link between subcontracting dispersion and the two resilience elements. Theoretically, this study has introduced the social network perspective to (1) empirically scrutinize the underexplored project resilience and its antecedents; (2) investigate the less-explored issue of subcontracting dispersion and clarify the “concentrated or dispersed” dilemma by differentiating the dimensions of social networks and elements of project resilience; and (3) shed light on the conflicting findings about the advantages of social networks by highlighting the disruption contexts. Practically, project managers can benefit to design subcontracting organizational arrangements and develop their subcontracting networks in order to enhance construction project resilience.