Resource and Cognitive Perspectives: Unraveling the Influence Mechanism of Project Governance on Organizational Resilience in Infrastructure Projects

Abstract

The tendency of infrastructure projects to be complex, large-scale, and long-term prompts temporary project organizations’ need to have resilience to deal with various risks, uncertainties, and crises. The resource and cognitive capacity of stakeholders are key factors in infrastructure project governance and crisis response in the face of shock generation. Moreover, previous studies on organizational resilience of infrastructure projects have lacked exploration from project governance perspectives. Hence, the objective of this study is to investigate the influence of contractual and relational governance on the organizational resilience of infrastructure projects from the perspectives of resource reconfiguration and organizational cognition. Firstly, this study established a conceptual model through a theoretical background and hypotheses development. Then, a questionnaire was designed for participants in the infrastructure projects to collect data on the respective effects of each variable. A total of 519 complete responses to the questionnaire were collected, and a path model was developed to quantitatively measure the impact of contractual and relational governance on organizational resilience using the partial least squares–structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) method. Finally, the model was validated using reliability and validity testing, hypotheses testing, and mediating effect testing. The results of the study showed that the contractual and relational governance can enhance the level of organizational resilience. Resource reconfiguration and organizational cognition play a mediating role in the relationship between project governance and organizational resilience. This study extends the theoretical research on the impact of project governance on organizational resilience, and deepens the intrinsic link between the two from the perspective of resource reconfiguration and organizational cognition, so as to provide effective theoretical guidance for crisis response and sustainable operation of infrastructure projects.