Identifying the influential components of organizational managers' behavior on reducing claims in construction projects

Identifying and managing the factors affecting the claim reduction of stakeholders can help a lot to achieve the goals of a project and an organization. Researchers have identified these factors from different perspectives, but so far seldom research has identified the influential components of organizational managers' behavior on reducing claims in construction projects. Current study aims to identify these behavioral components and provide effective strategies to reduce conflicts. The present study is applied and descriptive and is a field study in terms of purpose and data collection, respectively. The data collection tools are library studies, interviews and questionnaires and the statistical population of the research is project managers, professors and experts in the field of management and engineers working on projects. Library studies were conducted to identify the behavioral components of organizational managers and Delphi interviews were conducted with 18 experts to complete these components. Due to the infinite number of members of the community, the Cochran's infinite formula was used to calculate the number of sample members which calculated to be 196. To investigate the effect of the behavioral components of organizational managers on claim reduction, a structured-questionnaire was distributed among the sample members. To check the validity of the questionnaire, the content validity method was used with the opinion of experts and its reliability was confirmed by Cronbach's alpha of 0.872. Testing the hypotheses was done using the "binomial test" in SPSS20 software. According to the findings, more than 95% of the participants believed that the behavioral components of manager’s ethics, personality, fair judgment, performance, openness and responsibility, flexibility and agility, organizational culture, behavioral style, courage, explaining transparency, no lying and no hypocrisy, motivational behavior and lack of indifference play a prominent role in reducing conflicts and claims in construction projects.