Influence of teamwork approach on project performance: a case of road construction in Kericho County, Kenya

Abstract

Teamwork approach is a feature of the construction industry in the sense that construction projects are delivered by various professions who work as a team. These professionals may include architects, contractors, material suppliers, specialists, government planners and engineers. Teams in construction projects are developed as soon as they begin a new project. Little focus has been given to teamwork in road construction projects in this country. It is believed that adoption of teamwork enables project teams to create an environment that facilitates knowledge sharing among employees. Despite these initiatives, team work approach in road construction projects still requires much attention and improvements. Thus, with the key objective in project management being ensuring successful completion of projects and given the fact that project managers have been reluctant in adopting teamwork due to limited research and inconsistencies in research findings, the need for more research in this area is identified. KeRRA projects are not exception and therefore, there was need to carry out the current study to establish the effect of team work approach on performance of road construction projects in Kenya. In Kenya team work has been encouraged in every sector, more especially in construction industry so as to improve performance and create good working environment. It is not clear whether teamwork in road constructions yield any result at the end of the projects. This study therefore, was a descriptive-based research looking at the contribution of teamwork approach to project performance. In particular, this study focused on team leadership, team trust, team spirit, recognition and reward and how they influence road construction project performance in Kenya. The target population included KeRRA officials/project managers, consultants and contractors at Kericho County, giving a total number to eighty three (83). Since the population was small, census sampling technique was appropriate; this means the entire population in this research was subjected to the study. However, the study adopted a stratified random sampling method to split the population into three strata (i.e. KeRRA Project managers/coordinators, consultants and contractors). Questionnaires and interview schedules were used to collect the data. The collected data were cleaned, coded and entered to a computer Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) program for analysis. The responses from the open-ended questions were listed to obtain proportions appropriately; the responses were reported by descriptive narrative. The findings showed that teamwork has been encouraged in road construction projects; however, effort is still required to improve the initiative and ensure that teamwork is fully implemented in construction projects. It was found that findings showed that team trust, team leadership, team spirit, recognition and reward had positive significant relationship with project performance. The finding showed R square value as 0.588; indicating that team trust, team leadership, team spirit, recognition/reward accounts for 58.8% of performance of road construction projects. The study recommends for a well defined and realistic goals, roles and responsibilities in construction projects. More so, the government must formulate policies to support team efforts in construction projects. There is an opportunity to advance this research further by examining factors relating to personal traits of team members in construction project and to establish their influence on project performance.