Impact of project and organizational related factors on project performance of construction companies in Malaysia

The objective of this study was to examine and investigate the impact of project-related factors and organizational-related factors on the project performance of construction companies in Malaysia. The performance of construction companies is crucial for the economic development of the country and there are various factors which affect their performance. Past studies on project performance have been skewed towards project- related factors such as client, contractor, consultant, material, labor and equipment, contract, external and project management tools/techniques. Through the literature review, it was noticed that a research gap exists, whereby, for the success of a project, not only are project-related factors important, organizational-related factors are important too. Taking a lead from here, the most important organizational-related factors, such as leadership, organizational culture, innovation and learning organization were chosen and used in this study to examine and investigate the impact of these organizational factors on project performance. A pilot study was carried out and the instrument reliability was ascertained. The population for this study was the construction companies in Malaysia registered with the Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB) under the Grade 7 category. This quantitative study was carried out with a survey questionnaire. 1,071 questionnaires were sent to project managers of construction companies and 360 responses were received with a response rate of 33.61%. The collected data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Science version 22 (SPSS) for descriptive, reliability, validity and relative importance index analysis. The results of the study indicate that organizational-related factors have a greater significant impact on project performance over project-related factors. Thus, the outcome of the study is useful for the construction industry practitioners to understand the importance of organizational factors and to implement them in their organizations to improve project performance