Project Partnering: Improving the Likelihood of Win/Win Outcomes

Abstract

This article examines the potential benefits from management use of behavioral strategies in the development of successful trust-based and/or trust-emulating partnering relationships, raises questions about existing beliefs regarding the development of trust-based relationships, and offers alternative recommendations for practices drawn from research in the areas of trust development and game theory. Key differences between cooperative behavior strategies and trust-based relationships are described. Three general categories of trust (evolutionary, spontaneous, and preexistent) and two different domains of trust (interorganizational and intraorganizational) are examined along with different issues and opportunities for management. The article concludes that (1) strategies of behavior can play critical roles in the development and maintenance of successful partnering relationships; (2) premature insistence on the presence of interorganizational trust as a precursor to collaborative behavior between owner and contractor may actually be fatal to the development of a successful partnering relationship; (3) enhancement of economic benefits in an already successful partnering relationship may be one special product of trust-based relationships; and (4) spontaneous and/or preexistent trust may provide substantial but unpredictable benefits for partnering. Recommendations for management include increasing investment in project-long behavior monitoring, developing and implementing systems to feed back information for midproject relationship corrections, developing greater intraorganizational trust-based relationships, strengthening the decision-making capacity at the field level, and investing in additional personnel training with an emphasis on recognition of collaborative versus confrontational behaviors.