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The purpose of this study was to prioritize the appropriate generic contractor selection criteria for Engineering–Procurement–Construction (EPC) projects in the construction industry.

Proceeding from a review of previous studies and validation by a small group of experts, a preliminary set of 16 criteria was first identified. This was followed by three rounds of Delphi surveys: firstly, with 64 experienced participants confirming the relevance of the 16 criteria; secondly, with a reduced subgroup of 47 more experienced participants scoring the importance of each; and finally, providing the opportunity for these 47 to revise their scores in the light of knowing the aggregated results of the previous round.

The results show the consensus view, of which the most important criteria are ranked as past performance, project understanding, technical attributes, key personnel, health and safety, past experience, time, management, financial, contractual and legal, quality, cost, relationships, environmental and sustainability, organizational and industrial relations, and geographic location.

The findings are useful for both practitioners and academics in making a significant contribution to the body of knowledge of the EPC process. This will assist in providing a better understanding of criteria importance and pave the way to developing an EPC contractor selection model involving the criteria most needed to objectively identify potential contractors and evaluate tenders.

The authors contribute to the literature on leadership by investigating how characteristics of principal investigators (PIs) affect innovation performance, and how collaborative and non-collaborative projects moderate this relationship within the context of inter-organisational research projects.

The authors analysed panel data from the National Science and Technology Information Service on 171 research projects within a biomedical and regenerative medicines programme overseen by the Korea Health Industry Development Institute. The authors used a hierarchical regression model, based on the ordinary least squares method, to examine the relationship between PI characteristics and performance, considering both quantity and quality.

The results show that the characteristics of PIs have diverse effects on the quantity and quality of innovation performance. Gender diversity within PIs negatively affects the quality of innovation performance, while the capacity of PIs positively influences it. Moreover, the degree of PI’s engagement is positively associated with the quantity of innovation performance but does not have a significant relationship with the quality of performance. In terms of moderating effects, collaborative projects with multiple leaders seem less reliant on PI capacity than non-collaborative projects led by a single leader, in terms of innovation performance.

The results contribute significantly to the literature on innovation management by examining the role of leadership in collaborative environments to enhance innovation performance, addressing the need for empirical evidence in this area. Analyses of PI characteristics in government R&D management can lead to improved team performance, more efficient processes and effective resource allocation, ultimately fostering innovation.

This study aims to develop a polymer cement-based waterproof coating with self-healing capability to efficiently and intelligently solve the building leakage caused by cracking of waterproof materials, along with excellent durability to prolong its service life.

Ion chelators are introduced into the composite system based on ethylene vinyl acetate copolymer emulsion and ordinary Portland cement to prepare self-healing polymer cement-based waterproof coating. Hydration, microstructure, wettability, mechanical properties, durability, self-healing performance and self-healing products of polymer cement-based waterproof coating with ion chelator are investigated systematically. Meanwhile, the chemical composition of self-healing products in the crack was examined.

The results showed that ion chelators could motivate the hydration of C₂S and C₃S, as well as the formation of hydration products (C-S-H gel) of the waterproof coating to improve its compactness. Compared with the control group, the waterproof coating with ion chelator had more excellent water resistance, alkali resistance, thermal and UV aging resistance. When the dosage of ion chelator was 2%, after 28 days of curing, cracks with a width of 0.29 mm in waterproof coating could fully heal and cracks with a width of 0.50 mm could achieve a self-healing efficiency of 72%. Furthermore, the results reveal that the self-healing product in the crack was calcite crystalline CaCO₃.

A novel ion chelator was introduced into the composite coating system to endow it with excellent self-healing ability to prolong its service life. It has huge application potential in the field of building waterproofing.

The construction industry remains one of the most hazardous industries worldwide, with a higher number of fatalities and injuries each year. The safety and well-being of workers at a job site are paramount as they face both immediate and long-term risks such as falls and musculoskeletal disorders. To mitigate these dangers, sensor-based technologies have emerged as a crucial tool to promote the safety and well-being of workers on site. The implementation of real-time sensor data-driven monitoring tools can greatly benefit the construction industry by enabling the early identification and prevention of potential construction accidents. This study aims to explore the innovative method of prototype development regarding a safety monitoring system in the form of smart personal protective equipment (PPE) by taking advantage of the recent advances in wearable technology and cloud computing.

The proposed smart construction safety system has been meticulously crafted to seamlessly integrate with conventional safety gear, such as gloves and vests, to continuously monitor construction sites for potential hazards. This state-of-the-art system is primarily geared towards mitigating musculoskeletal disorders and preventing workers from inadvertently entering high-risk zones where falls or exposure to extreme temperatures could occur. The wearables were introduced through the proposed system in a non-intrusive manner where the safety vest and gloves were chosen as the base for the PPE as almost every construction worker would be required to wear them on site. Sensors were integrated into the PPE, and a smartphone application which is called SOTER was developed to view and interact with collected data. This study discusses the method and process of smart PPE system design and development process in software and hardware aspects.

This research study posits a smart system for PPE that utilises real-time sensor data collection to improve worksite safety and promote worker well-being. The study outlines the development process of a prototype that records crucial real-time data such as worker location, altitude, temperature and hand pressure while handling various construction objects. The collected data are automatically uploaded to a cloud service, allowing supervisors to monitor it through a user-friendly smartphone application. The worker tracking ability with the smart PPE can help to alleviate the identified issues by functioning as an active warning system to the construction safety management team. It is steadily evident that the proposed smart PPE system can be utilised by the respective industry practitioners to ensure the workers' safety and well-being at construction sites through monitoring of the workers with real-time sensor data.

The proposed smart PPE system assists in reducing the safety risks posed by hazardous environments as well as preventing a certain degree of musculoskeletal problems for workers. Ultimately, the current study unveils that the construction industry can utilise cloud computing services in conjunction with smart PPE to take advantage of the recent advances in novel technological avenues and bring construction safety management to a new level. The study significantly contributes to the prevailing knowledge of construction safety management in terms of applying sensor-based technologies in upskilling construction workers' safety in terms of real-time safety monitoring and safety knowledge sharing.

Despite the literature on subordinates' destructive responses to abusive leadership, an emerging body of literature proposes that subordinates may react constructively to abusive supervision under certain conditions. The authors contribute to this line of research by proposing and testing the moderating effects of performance-approach and -avoidance goal orientation on the relationship between abusive supervision and task performance, and by testing work effort as a mechanism underlying this moderating effect.

The study hypotheses were tested in two studies. In Study 1 (field survey, N = 230), the moderation hypotheses were tested. Study 2 (experiment, N = 116) extended Study 1 and examined the mediated moderation model.

The study empirical evidence from the two studies showed that (1) abusive supervision was more positively related to an employee's task performance when that employee's performance-approach goal orientation was high (vs low), (2) abusive supervision was not more positively related to task performance when performance-avoidance goal orientation was high (vs low) and (3) the employee's work effort mediated the moderating effect of performance-approach goal orientation.

This research suggests that organizations and subordinates should be aware of the positive contextual role of performance-approach goal orientation, which may shape subordinates' subsequent work behavior in response to supervisors' hostility, and should invest more time and effort in reinforcing subordinates' performance-approach goal orientation.

This study has identified a new condition and offers new evidence of the potential functional effect of abusive supervision. Specifically, the study finding of the positive moderating role of performance-approach goal orientation adds to the literature examining when abused subordinates respond constructively to abusive supervision. The study analysis of the mediating effect of work effort further reveals the mechanism of this effect.

Quality failures in grid infrastructure construction would cause large-scale collapses in power supply and additional expenditures by reworks and repairs. Learning from quality failures (LFQF) extracts experience from previous quality events and converts them into preventive measures to reduce or eliminate future construction quality issues. This study aims to investigate the influence factors of LFQF in the construction of grid infrastructure.

The related factors of LFQF, including quality management (QM) practices, quality rectification, and individual learning, were identified by reviewing literature about organizational learning and extracting experience from previous failures. A questionnaire survey was distributed to the grid companies in North, Northeast, Northwest, East, Central, and Southwest China. 381 valid responses collected and analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the influence of these factors on LFQF.

The SEM results support that QM practices positively affect individual learning and LFQF. Quality rectification indirectly impacts LFQF via individual learning, while the results did not support the direct link between quality rectification and LFQF.

The findings strengthen practical insights into extracting experience from poor-quality issues and continuous improvement. The contributory factors of LFQF found in this study benefit the practitioners by taking effective measures to enhance organizational learning capability and improve the long-term construction quality performance in the grid infrastructure industry.

Existing research about the application of LFQF still stays at the explorative and conceptual stage. This study investigates the related factors of LFQF, including QM practices, quality rectification, and individual learning, extending the model development of learning from failures (LFF) in construction QM.

This study aims to investigate the content of hotel brands’ mission statements (MSs) and their relationship with selected attributes of hotel brands.

Content analysis of hotel brands’ MSs was used to detect the MSs’ key words, which were further processed by methods of social network analysis, complemented by clustering techniques and correspondence analysis on the generalized aggregated lexical tables, a special type of correspondence analysis.

Hotel brands operating in luxurious markets more often emphasize experiences than those in midscale markets. Furthermore, hotel brands with longer traditions and those with a large number of controlled rooms communicate words in their MSs that represent a rather traditional approach to hospitality. Younger hotel brands with fewer controlled rooms chose words that indicate a more commercially oriented approach. Finally, cluster analysis revealed four dimensions of hotel brands’ MSs, instead of the nine most typically used in mission statement component models.

Understanding the frequencies and networks of keywords, and their relationship with hotel brand attributes, will help create more focussed MSs. This will strengthen hotel brands, raise their revenues and subsequently increase company performance.

The analysis provides valuable insight into MSs in the specific tourism context of hotel brands. The authors have achieved this with the use of a wide range of advanced network analytic methods. These insights can guide hotel brands to better position themselves in the competitive tourism accommodation market.

Customers' co-design behavior is an important source of knowledge for product innovation. Firms can regulate the focus of information interaction with customers to set goals and motivate their co-design behavior. Drawing on regulatory fit theory and construal level theory, the authors build a research model to study whether the fit between the regulatory focus of firms' task invitations (promotion focus vs prevention focus) and their feedback focus (self-focused vs other-focused) can enhance co-design behavior by improving customers' experiences (perceived meaning, active discovery and perceived empowerment).

The authors conducted two online between-subjects experiments to validate the proposed research model.

The two online experiments reveal that customers' experiences are enhanced when the feedback focus is congruent with the regulatory focus of the firm's task invitations. Specifically, self-focused feedback has a stronger positive effect on customers' experiences in the prevention focus context. Other-focused feedback has a stronger positive effect on customers' experiences in the promotion focus context. Moreover, customers' experience significantly and positively affects co-design behavior (i.e. co-design effort and knowledge contribution).

This work provides theoretical and practical implications for firms to improve the effectiveness of information interaction with their customers and eventually ensure the sustainability of co-design.

Knowledge regarding the importance of the psychosocial work environment for health and well-being in the workplace is extensive. However, more knowledge is needed about how the managers’ organizational conditions are related to what occupational health and safety management (OHSM) is actually conducted and how this relates to the work-related health of employees. The aim of this study is therefore to investigate if managers’ organizational conditions are associated with the conducted OHSM, and if the conducted OHSM is associated with the psychosocial work environment and well-being of the employees.

An electronic questionnaire was sent to managers and their employees working in 10 different organizations in Sweden, resulting in 1,097 valid responses. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to analyze the results.

The SEM analysis showed that managers’ conditions were related to employee well-being via OHSM and psychosocial work environment (job demands and job resources).

This study contributes to the existing literature in the field of OHSM by placing explicit focus on the role of organizational conditions for conducting OHSM. By studying not only the link between work environment and health, but also focus on the underlying organizational structures for OHSM, provides additional possibilities for prevention of the increasing work-related illness. As such, this paper contributes to a more holistic perspective in the field of OHSM.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of well-being in mediating the relationship between workplace spirituality and job satisfaction. It also studies the role of spiritual leadership in moderating the effect of workplace spirituality on well-being.

The study proposes a hypothesized model tested among 515 teachers from Indian higher educational institutions, selected through random sampling. Mediation and moderation analysis are used to test the hypothesized relationships.

Drawn on positive organizational studies, the results indicate that inner well-being, comprising of psychological, emotional, social, spiritual and intellectual dimensions, does not mediate the relationship between spiritual dimension of workplace spirituality and job satisfaction. Same effect is observed for mediation role of physical well-being. However, inner well-being and physical well-being both mediate the relationship between mindfulness and job satisfaction among teachers. Also, teachers experience higher levels of well-being in the presence of spiritual leadership at their workplaces.

The paper contributes to leadership and workplace spirituality literature by testing an integrated framework of mediating role of inner well-being and physical well-being.

The study helps practitioners to integrate their practices and programs with workplace spirituality for improving well-being and attaining positive outcomes, which can further contribute to performance and productivity in institutions.

The proposed framework highlights the impact of workplace spirituality dimensions and mindfulness on inner well-being and physical well-being of teachers which lead to positive outcomes such as job satisfaction. It also enriches the spiritual leadership literature.