Practical Project Governance Approaches to Achieving Inter-Organization Collaboration Between Stakeholders in Off-Site Construction Projects: Adaptive Dynamic Perspective

As an essential domain of project management, inter-organization collaboration (IOC) is crucial for stakeholders in off-site construction (OSC) projects because of the high linkage between design, production, and site construction stages. Current studies focus on the static relationships between project governance approaches and the OSC project stakeholder collaboration. This study proposes the OSC project stakeholder’s IOC activity as an adaptive system to explore the practical project governance mechanisms to achieve IOC from a dynamics perspective using a survey and Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction simulation experiment. The finding suggests that project organizational structure and project governance mechanisms are complementary rather than substitutive for improving inter-organizational collaboration between the OSC project stakeholders. The impact paths are practical between project organizational structures and IOC via mediating roles of contract and trust. Moreover, project organizational structure, contract, and trust are a dynamic combination instead of independent. Our study deepens our understanding of the OSC project stakeholders’ IOC by exploring its emergence mechanism, enriching project stakeholder management research on inter-organizational behavioral foundations of collaboration emergence in a temporary projected organization. It also provides practical project governance tools to improve a temporary projected IOC by coordinating project governance mechanisms and project organizational structures.