Significant Factors Affecting the Quality of Housing Infrastructure Project Construction in Saudi Arabia Using PLS-SEM

Abstract

Quality construction contributes to the overall sustainability of the built environment, especially for infrastructure projects. High-quality housing infrastructure projects benefit individuals, communities, and the economy. Most studies are concerned with identifying the reasons for the quality of a construction project. However, only a few of them have been concerned with housing infrastructure. In addition, no studies have considered the interdependencies among the factors affecting the quality of housing infrastructure projects, leading to these causes not being evaluated effectively. This paper aims to specify and organize the significant factors affecting the quality of housing infrastructure projects. These projects suffer from the availability of all infrastructure services simultaneously before their execution. A comprehensive literature review was implemented to collect all the factors affecting their quality. Construction sector experts designed and filled out a questionnaire based on the collected data. The survey data were then statistically analyzed using a partial least squares structural equation model (PLS-SEM) to organize the causes and examine the interdependencies among the quality of each cause. Our main finding revealed that based on the PLS-SEM, the top three factors affecting the construction quality were the skill and experience of supervisory staff, errors and omissions in design documents, and the lack of communication between supervisors and laborers. Based on the PLS-SEM ranking, labor, equipment, and site staff were responsible for more than half of the top 10 causes. The PLS-SEM results showed that the contractor material (CM) and project design (PD) percentages were 20% and 30%.. In addition, there is an interaction influence between the labor/equipment/site staff (LES) causes and PD causes. This study assists stakeholders in understanding how to use Six Sigma construction concepts to enhance performance in the nation’s construction industry, which helps contractors make improvements in variability reduction and save costs in construction projects.