نقش میانجی از سبک های رهبری در همکاری پروژه های یکپارچه: دیدگاه هوش هیجانی The mediation role of leadership styles in integrated project collaboration: An emotional intelligence perspective

1. Introduction Over the last decades, there are strong arguments for incorporating all project parties into one team to perform a project and applying relational contracting appropriately (Kumaraswamy et al., 2005; Rahman and Kumaraswamy, 2011; Bygballe et al., 2016). Therefore, a new project delivery method known as integrated project delivery (IPD) emerged and the benefit of integrated process has been identified through professional institutes and living project samples (Lenferink et al., 2013; El Asmar et al., 2013; Sun et al., 2015). Bond by the three IPD principles of early involvement of all parties, shared risk and rewards, and multiparty agreement (Kent and Becerik-Gerber, 2010), collaboration among heterogeneous project parties has become the critical success factor for operating integrated projects (Phua and Rowlinson, 2004; Xue et al., 2010). Keeping favorable collaboration helps not only achieve short-term business objectives such as the three success criteria of cost, time, and quality (Iyer and Jha, 2005; Chiocchio et al., 2011; Kärnä et al., 2013; Brito et al., 2014), but also foster harmonious working relationships and important affective states crucial to long-term steady development (Eriksson, 2010; Chiocchio et al., 2011; Meng, 2012). As a matter of fact, it is challengeable for contracting parties which are organized in different structures and interest demands to attain a high level of collaboration in IPD. The architects’ reluctance to change decisions made by owners, for example, may lead to reduced satisfaction or even a collapse of collaboration. Thus, some scholars considered that project participants’ collaboration satisfaction could provide a holistic perspective to measure complex project success (Kärnä et al., 2013). Heimbürger and Dietrich (2012) and Li et al. (2013) have contributed to the measures of participant satisfaction by establishing multi-factor hierarchical fuzzy evaluation model and theoretical framework respectively. However, there is still a lack of comprehensive collaboration satisfaction criteria for IPD and the exploration of potential influencing mechanisms at social and psychological level. In the competitive construction environment, numerous organizations insist that their “greatest asset is our people” (Butler and Chinowsky, 2006) and choosing right participants to team is paramount (O’Connor, 2009). Leaders in IPD, referred to authorized representatives of each participant in this paper, are the critical factors that influence internal organization operation and external collaborative relationships. Their ideas of open and honest communication, collaborative decision and risk allocation may help improve organizational subordinates’ commitment to IPD (Lok and Crawford, 2004; O’Connor, 2009). Moreover, project leaders can recognize the characteristics of different participants intuitively and then influence the project outcomes based on their emotional cognition and power (Nzekwe-Excel et al., 2010; Li et al., 2013). Many scholars argued that the leadership of project managers have great influence on project performance (Müller and Turner, 2007; Yang et al., 2011; Kasapoğlu, 2013). Therefore, leaders in IPD can achieve good project performance through appropriate leadership.