How to Foster Project Organization Resilience in the Construction Industry: The Role of Data Governance Capabilities

With the ongoing changes in global economic and social environments, project organization resilience has emerged as a core competency in addressing environmental uncertainty, thereby becoming a prominent research area within construction management. This resilience is intricately linked to data resources; however, construction enterprises face systemic challenges in governance—fragmented data standards, siloed storage, and underutilized analytics—which limit their ability to translate data into crisis-responsive actions. Consequently, it is of paramount importance to investigate how data governance capabilities influence project organization resilience. This study initially identifies five dimensions of data governance capabilities within construction enterprises, spanning the three stages of planning, flow, and application: top-level design, data standard management, data collection, data storage, and data application. These dimensions are derived through a combination of literature review and expert interviews. Subsequently, this study establishes a theoretical model titled “Data Governance Capability—Project Organization Resilience”, exploring the relationships among these data governance capability dimensions and their correlations with project organization resilience. Data were collected through 142 valid questionnaires from practitioners in the Chinese construction industry and analyzed by the Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) method. The results indicate a significant relationship between data governance capabilities and project organization resilience, contributing to the research on the antecedents of the latter. This study offers a scale for construction enterprises to systematically assess data governance capabilities and provides guidance on enhancing organization resilience by progressively nurturing these capabilities.