Exploring Mental Models of Construction Managers

Abstract

Experience is a critical component of expertise for construction managers. Time allows them to inductively construct and organize knowledge about the construction management domain that often cannot be easily formalized. The goal of this study was to investigate the nature of expertise in construction managers. Both experts and novices represent and organize experientially gained knowledge as abstractions that we refer to as mental models. We investigated expertise by exploring mental models of construction managers. In this study we explored experimentally the existence of a difference in the mental models among construction managers. A group of construction managers with varying levels of experience were asked to respond to a construction management crisis scenario. Using the ConProFac software to calculate an index i indicative of the structuredness of the responses we found a significant correlation between i and the number of years of experience of the respondent. A better understanding of the mental models of experienced construction managers will help in developing a better theoretical understanding of the CM domain, while also enriching the construction management educational experience.