عوامل مفهومی شایستگی مدیریت پروژه ساخت و ساز : چشم انداز چینی

In recent years Western project management theories and practices have become increasingly recognized and dispersed in China, particularly in construction-related work. The assessment and development of project management competence in China are driven by attempts to follow the Western standards-based competence certification programmes. Yet little is known about whether and how the predefined set of knowledge embodied in the Western standards are used by Chinese project managers in their workplace. In this paper we report an empirical exploration of Chinese construction project managers’ ways of conceiving and accomplishing their work. We replicate in the Chinese context the previous UK-based phenomenographic study of construction project management competence, which revealed three different conceptions arranged in a hierarchy of performance. The results of this China-based study confirm the conceptual determinants of construction project management competence first revealed in the UK, and provide practical implications for effective training and professional certification of project management competence in China. Meanwhile, the replication of the phenomenographic approach to understanding project management competence in China enhances the cross-cultural validity of the approach and highlights its potential for explorative management research.

Modern forms of project management originated in the Western aerospace and defence sectors in the late 1950s and 1960s, and became more dispersed in the 1970s most notably in construction-related work. Since then the discipline has grown in refinement and recognition, to the extent that most large Western organizations now regard project management as an important organizational capability. There are now a number of well-established project management standards that define the scope of the discipline and describe its theories, processes, tools, and techniques. These standards are now widely used as the basis for assessing, developing and certifying project management competence [1]. Although China started to import the concepts and skills of project management from the West in the 1960s, these were narrowly confined to major national defence research projects such as the strategic missile system [2]. However, since the Chinese economic reforms of the 1980s, project management theories and practices have become increasingly recognized in China, particularly in construction-related work. Now, the assessment and development of project management competence in China are driven by attempts to follow the widespread Western standards-based professional competence certification programmes. Prominent recent examples of this trend include the launch of PMI’s PMP examination and certification programme in 2000, and the IPMA’s programme in 2001 [3]. The use of project management standards for professional competence assessment and development in the West and their transposition into the Chinese context are based on the assumption that management practices are context-independent and universal. This premise may be questioned, since the pre-defined context-free knowledge and principles embodied in the standards specify only what competent project managers should know and do rather than whether and how project managers use these knowledge and principles in accomplishing their work. There is a clear opportunity and need to understand Chinese practicing project managers’ ways of conceiving and experiencing Western originated project management work within the Chinese context. In a previous study, Chen and Partington [4] took an interpretive approach based on the principles of phenomenography [5] and [6] to explore project managers’ ways of experiencing and accomplishing their work, thereby understanding the determinants of their performance in the workplace. From their interviews with 30 project managers in UK construction firms, Chen and Partington [4] identified three different basic conceptions of project management work, reflecting a hierarchy of three forms of construction project management competence in the UK. This paper reports a replication of Chen and Partington’s [4] UK-based phenomenographic study through a matched sample of project managers from Chinese construction firms. In the next section, we first discuss the determinants of project management competence and give a brief summary of Chen and Partington’s [4] previous study. We then review the conception-based approach to understanding competence, known as phenomenography, and describe the methods and results of this study in China. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for practice and future research.

With the increasingly spread of Western standards-based project management professional competence certification programmes in China, it is worth exploring Chinese project managers’ ways of experiencing and accomplishing their work, and thus to understand their competence at work. By replicating Chen and Partington’s [4] previous UK-based phenomenographic study of construction project management competence, this study demonstrates how Chinese construction project managers’ ways of experiencing their work, namely, their conceptions of their work, determine their competence at work. The research findings suggest that whether and how the predefined set of knowledge embodied in the Western standards are used by Chinese construction project managers in their workplace are preceded and determined by their conceptions of that work. With different conceptions, Chinese project managers attach different meanings to the attributes and organize the attributes into a distinctive competence in performing their work. Thus, the findings of this study in China confirm the conceptual determinants of construction project management competence in the workplace first revealed in Chen and Partington’s [4] previous study in the UK. Further, the replication of the phenomenographic approach to understanding project management competence in China enhances the cross-cultural validity of the approach and highlights its potential for explorative management research. Meanwhile, the research findings reported here provide practical implications for effective training and professional certification of project management competence within the Chinese context. It is our hope that the findings of this study will provide fresh insight for Chinese government and professional organizations to develop and update project management competence assessment and development programmes relevant to construction project management work within the Chinese context. This may also have implications for designing and conducting effective training courses on construction project management in China. Moreover, variations in the forms of conceptions and meanings attached to each conception in the two nations highlight the cultural impacts on project management work performance that has implications for further in-depth research. The findings of this research are, of course, based on data from a single industry in China, and caution should be exercised in generalizing the findings to contexts other than construction projects in China.