Date Available

4-13-2022

Year of Publication

2022

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Civil Engineering (MSCE)

College

Engineering

Department/School/Program

Civil Engineering

Advisor

Hala Nassereddine

Co-Director of Graduate Studies

Gabriel Dadi

Abstract

Organizational change can be defined as an alteration of a core aspect of an organization’s operation, structure, or culture. Previous research on organizational change mainly has focused on different types of technical changes, such as alternative project delivery methods and strategies to adopt the design-build approach successfully. Also, previous studies have focused on the project level changes instead of organizational level responses. Here I show using a proposed change model and performing thematic, and analysis, that there exist common responses, and challenges across different types of capital projects organizations studied. The results show that responses to change will differ as a function of the type of change, and the organization’s capabilities and resources. Furthermore, when performing organizational changes, the impact on “people” within the organization should be closely studied and monitored, while taking into account other challenges that might impact the organization.

For drivers of change, the main themes were related to Market shift. Clients/owners’ needs, and Sustainability. On the other hand, the organizational responses’ main themes were related to Restructuring, Communication, Partnerships, Training, Recruitment, Internal capabilities, organizational design, and supportive leadership. While for challenges, the main themes were mainly related to Resistance to change, the nature of the industry, and retaining the workforce.

One of the major challenges faced during the research was motivating the organizations to participate. Various organizations showed interest and then decided not to join, while others that participated had to review their responses multiple times, and were concerned about revealing their “Trade secrets”.

Future work should build on this effort and consider the responses and analyze them as a function of types of change, Moreover, future research should consider asking the interviewees to “weight” the responses to avoid wrong conclusions due to the low number of in-text mentions. This research will help capital project organizations to be aware of the main areas of concern during the journey of change and help them to learn from previous experiences from other organizations.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2022.63

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