Voice behavior of project team members (PTMs), defined as the process in which PTMs proactively share ideas, concerns, and opinions about work-related issues to improve the status quo of projects, is pivotal but underexplored in construction projects. Using social identity theory, this study investigated how inclusive leadership influences PTMs’ voice behavior with survey data from 232 construction PTMs. The results indicated that inclusive leadership predicts PTMs’ promotive and prohibitive voice behavior, whereas project identification mediates both relationships. Team coordination strengthens such indirect impacts of inclusive leadership on PTMs’ prohibitive voice. Theoretical and practical implications of these empirical findings are discussed.

Purpose: A lack of reliable and effective communication tools poses major barriers impeding the performance of construction projects consisting of diverse participants. Although some construction project teams (CPTs) begin to apply social media (SM) as an available approach for project management the entire mechanism of SM adoption in this specific context remains understudied. Therefore, this study aims to adopt a CPT's lens to investigate the critical antecedents and associated effects underlying SM adoption in the construction industry.Design/methodology/approach: Based on the technology–organization–environment (TOE) theory, a conceptual model was proposed and tested by empirical data collected from 159 CPTs in China. Structural equation modeling technique was employed for data analysis.Findings: The results demonstrate that all the five extracted TOE-based antecedents including two technological factors (i.e. compatibility and expected cost), one organizational factor (i.e. top management support) and two environmental factors (i.e. project partner collaboration and project fit) are crucial to the adoption of SM in CPTs. Besides, SM acceptance is found to mediate the relationships between organizational and environmental factors and SM use. Moreover, SM use significantly predicts the communication effectiveness of CPTs.Research limitations/implications: A questionnaire study based on cross-sectional data from China may only unveil the logic of SM adoption in the context of Chinese construction industry within a shorter time interval. It is recommended that future research could develop longitudinal studies among various construction practitioners in different countries to further specify and generalize the current findings.Originality/value: This paper provides a comprehensive understanding of SM adoption in the construction industry by exploring the preadoption antecedents and postadoption effects from the perspective of project teams. The empirical findings advance the current web-based project management literature and afford new insights for construction practitioners into better managing SM application to reap its full capabilities in projects.

Mobile information and communication technologies (MICTs) have been widely adopted to facilitate construction project management by many construction organizations. Yet, scholars have rarely emphasized the growing concern regarding the overuse issue of MICT among construction management professionals, especially construction project managers (CPMs). Against this background, drawing on the stressor-strain-outcome framework and job demand-resources model, this research aimed to explore how different MICT overuse patterns (i.e., MICT excessive use at work and MICT connective use after work) by CPMs affect their well-being in terms of job burnout and the underlying mechanism. The moderating role of team member support was also examined as the boundary condition in the influencing process of MICT overuse. Empirical data from 216 CPMs were analyzed with structural equation modeling. The results revealed that both patterns of MICT overuse led to the two strains including technology–work conflict and role overload, which in turn exacerbated CPMs’ job burnout. In addition, team member support was found to buffer the impacts of MICT connective use after work on these strains. This study highlights the need for a deeper understanding of the negative side of MICT use in the construction project context with guidance for construction organizations on mitigating the adverse effects of MICT use in practice. Furthermore, these empirical findings bring useful insights into the causes of CPMs’ job burnout through a novel human–technology interaction perspective.

Exits are essential to the efficiency of building evacuation due to its irreplaceable function, and the layout of multiple exits has always been the key concern for architectural design. To accurately evaluate the evacuation efficiency of different multiexit layouts and optimize the design rules, a dynamic exit decision model integrating an exit selection strategy and the social force model is developed to simulate the practical evacuation. And our proposed model outperforms the original social force model in terms of evacuation efficiency. Accordingly, different layouts are analyzed for evacuation in a single room with two exits. The analysis results reveal that evacuation time will be improved with the changes of exit locations and two parallel exits are validated as the most efficient layout among the three common categories. Affected by walking time and queuing time of evacuees, it is not conducive to evacuation whether the separation of two exits is too large or too small. Furthermore, an even symmetry is found more efficient than an asymmetric distribution of exits under some conditions. This work provides a basis for architectural designs of multiple exits and a foundation for further study of evacuation simulation.