Many construction projects are of long-duration and high value and foreseeing and planning for every eventuality may be impossible. Engineers and managers are expected to solve problems surfacing during the execution stage. Moreover, problems blended with conflict are damaging and manifest as disputes. The authors suggested that construction dispute can be conceptualized as having three basic components: contract provisions, triggering events and conflict. This conceptualization fits nicely with fault tree (FT) framework that is used to evaluate system failures. Furthermore, through the use of a hypothetical case, a fuzzy FT model was employed to analyze the likelihood of construction dispute. This research suggested that complex project delivered in the traditional design then build approach, construction dispute are bound to appear

Project performance is always one of the key concerns of construction project managers. It is often regarded as the critical indicator to measure the success of construction organization. This paper further advances existing knowledge on the achievement of project performance by investigating its relationship with trust and communication. Specifically, the mediating role of communication is studied to detect any direct and/or indirect effect of communication on this relationship. An analytical approach of mediation analysis was performed to achieve this objective. Five significant mediation models were identified. These models demonstrate that trust affects communication and in so doing influences project performance. Specifically, effective information flow is the versatile mediator to the trust-project performance relationships among all of these significant models. This implies that the improvement of information flow would likely improve project performance (i.e., achieve satisfactory and wort...