Purpose: Creativity and innovation are crucial in improving the organizational performance and sustaining competitive advantage. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between knowledge hiding and team creativity.Design/methodology/approach: The authors tested the hypotheses with a sample of 87 knowledge worker teams involving 393 employees and employers in China.Findings: Knowledge hiding is negatively related to team creativity, fully mediated by absorptive capacity. In addition, the negative relationship between knowledge hiding and absorptive capacity would be weakened by task interdependence.Practical implications: Team managers should take measures to avoid the development of knowledge hiding, which is indirectly related to team creativity via absorptive capacity within a team, and motivate team members to share more knowledge by training to improve their feelings of accountability, responsibility, and duty. In addition, managers can decrease knowledge hiding by strengthening within-team task interdependence.Originality/value: This study is one of the first to investigate the relationship between knowledge hiding and team creativity and the moderating role of task interdependence in the relationship between knowledge hiding and absorptive capacity.

Some contractor selection methods currently in existence are criticized as incomplete and biased, and lacking consideration in terms of the contractor's ability to achieve simultaneously, time, cost, quality and safety standards. This research examines an alternative contractor selection model called the analytical hierarchy process (AHP), which will help construction clients to identify contractors with the best potential to deliver satisfactory outcomes in a final contractor selection process which is not based simply on the lowest bid. The AHP comprises three parts: hierarchic structure, prioritization procedure, and calculation of results. This model is tested by a hypothetical scenario where three contractor candidates are evaluated. The criteria used for contractor selection in the model have been identified, and the significance of each criterion has been arrived at by conducting a questionnaire survey in public organizations in Hong Kong. Comparisons are made by ranking the aggregate scores of each candidate with regard to their performance against each of the criteria, and the candidate associated with the highest scores is the best contractor on this occasion.Analytical Hierarchy Process Contractor Selection Prequalification Final Selection Tender Price,

With China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Chinese construction market will be increasingly open and finally become part of the international market. Because of different social and economic systems, as well as different historical and cultural backgrounds, contractors are likely to encounter different risks in different markets. Based on questionnaires and case studies, this paper adopts an importance evaluation index and makes an importance evaluation of various risks encountered by Chinese contractors when contracting for projects in Chinese markets. This paper also makes comparisons between and analyses of the research findings and related available investigation results. The Cox–Stuart trend increase test method is applied in the current research, the results indicating that the variance corresponding to the importance index value tends to increase as the risk event importance decreases. This tendency shows that those investigated tend towards unanimity in terms of higher importa...

This research focuses on contracting firms within the construction sector. It characterizes and evaluates the composition of organizational culture using four culture types (clan, adhocracy, market, and hierarchy), the strategic approach for knowledge flow, and the success of knowledge management (KM) systems at different hierarchical levels of contracting organizations (project and parent organization level). Responses from managers of local or overseas contracting firms operating in Hong Kong were collected using a carefully constructed questionnaire survey that was distributed through electronic mail. The organizational value is analyzed in terms of the four cultural models. Clan culture is found to be the most popular at both project and organization levels, which means that the culture of contracting firms very much depends on honest communication, respect for people, trust, and cohesive relationships. On the other hand, hierarchy culture, which focuses on stability and continuity, and analysis and c...