Knowledge integration process in construction projects: a social network analysis approach to compare competitive and collaborative working

Abstract

Social cues, such as eye gaze and pointing fingers, can increase the prioritisation of specific locations for cognitive processing. A previous study using a manual reaching task showed that, although both gaze and pointing cues altered target prioritisation (reaction times [RTs]), only pointing cues affected action execution (trajectory deviations). These differential effects of gaze and pointing cues on action execution could be because the gaze cue was conveyed through a disembodied head; hence, the model lacked the potential for a body part (i.e., hands) to interact with the target. In the present study, the image of a male gaze model, whose gaze direction coincided with two potential target locations, was centrally presented. The model either had his arms and hands extended underneath the potential target locations, indicating the potential to act on the targets (Experiment 1), or had his arms crossed in front of his chest, indicating the absence of potential to act (Experiment 2). Participants reached to a target that followed a nonpredictive gaze cue at one of three stimulus onset asynchronies. RTs and reach trajectories of the movements to cued and uncued targets were analysed. RTs showed a facilitation effect for both experiments, whereas trajectory analysis revealed facilitatory and inhibitory effects, but only in Experiment 1 when the model could potentially act on the targets. The results of this study suggested that when the gaze model had the potential to interact with the cued target location, the model's gaze affected not only target prioritisation but also movement execution.

Assessing collaborative performance on construction projects through knowledge exchange

“…Innovation requires new combinations of knowledge in knowledge intensive industries (Holt et al, 2000;Kim & Lee, 2006;McAdam, 2005;Rezgui et al, 2010;Ruan et al, 2012), such as construction (Rezgui, 2001), and supporting the view that poor communication and exchange of information is a major cause for the lagging performance of the industry (Isikdag & Underwood, 2010). On the other hand, as most knowledge resides in people (Choo, 1998;Choo et al, 2000), KE represents the fundamental contribution of people in collaboration, and therefore turns into an invaluable source of evidence for performance assessment.…”

“…Ruan et al, 2012). However, construction sector performance has long been failed by poor communication and exchange of information between project participants (Isikdag & Underwood, 2010).…”

The Influence of Communication on Knowledge Integration in CFTs: A Case of Chinese Mobile Applications Enterprise

“…The CFT is extremely hard to implement communication and KI effectively in above three aspects. Also, the research about KI across organizational boundaries is still limited (Ruan, Ochieng, Price, & Egbu, 2012). Thus, our study targets the relationship between communication and KI in this type of special organizational form.…”

Knowledge Management Research in the Construction Industry: a Review

“…When KM activities such as knowledge sharing and knowledge learning became popular themes of KM research, the integration of fragmental KM activities was finally focused (Ruan et al 2012). The impacts of influential factors on KM activities (Idris et al 2015) and of KM activities on construction outcomes (Venkateswaran and Aundhe 2013) were also embedded in the construction process (Akhavian and Behzadan 2014).…”