*4.5. Managerial Implications*

Based on the above results, the structural characteristics of the collaborative networks formed by owners and contractors involved in projects that won NQEA and the evolution of each organization's position in the network from 2013 to 2021 can be identified. Accordingly, the following management insights can be proposed for organizations to improve their collaborative relationships and thus contribute to the development of the organizations and the industry.


companies should pay special attention to improving their management capabilities and technical levels and follow the principle of excellence when undertaking projects to establish their industry reputation and lay the foundation for market expansion and collaborative relationship establishment.

(4) The results of NMA indicate that there are two local collaborative patterns in the network, i.e., motif and anti-motif. Motifs are mainly triangle-based collaborative patterns, and anti-motifs are binary collaborative patterns. Generally, project organizations can reduce the uncertainty in the search for collaboration and increase the likelihood of successful collaboration based on previous collaboration experience (relational embeddedness) and common third collaborator (structural embeddedness) [79,80]. The triangle-based collaborative pattern is beneficial for the organization to obtain information about indirect partners and can help the organization to establish contacts with indirect partners through direct partners, thus effectively expanding the scope of collaboration. Triangle-based motifs reflect collaborative patterns with structurally embedded features. The owners and contractors can deepen their partnership with more indirect partners to create opportunities to participate in more large-scale projects.

#### **5. Conclusions**

Collaboration between the owners and contractors is key to the success of a construction project. Recently, with the increase in construction projects in China, a complex collaborative relationship has formed between the owners and contractors. It is necessary to systematically and deeply understand the complexity and dynamics of this collaborative relationship. Based on the data of NQEA projects from 2013 to 2021, we adopted the SNA and NMA methods to establish a collaborative network between the owners and contractors in China's construction industry and analyzed the structural characteristics and dynamic evolution of the collaborative network.

The main findings of the study are as follows. (1) The collaborative networks formed by owners and contractors that have won NQEA in China became larger and more complex in structure during the study period. This indicates that the large number of construction projects in China has led to the involvement of an increasing number of owners and contractors who have formed an intricate network of relationships. In the evolution of the network, there have been island-like groups, where the organizations within the group are closely connected, but they are less connected to organizations outside the group. This result can help organizations in the isolated groups to understand their dilemma and suggest that they need to expand their cooperation with other organizations. (2) The results of the centrality analysis indicate that most of the organizations at the core of the network are large state-owned contractors who have rich resources and strong power. Their central position in the network indicates that they have had cooperative relationships with many owners and other contractors and have a large industry influence. There is a need to strengthen the driving role of these state-owned contractors in the development of China's construction industry. In addition, the results of centrality also show that most of the organizations at the core of the network have repeatedly won NQEA, such as China Construction Third Engineering Bureau, China Construction Eighth Engineering Bureau, and China Construction Second Engineering Bureau. This suggests that there is a preference attachment effect in the construction market, i.e., winning NQEAs for quality construction work gives them more opportunities to undertake new projects and form new partnerships with new owners and other contractors. (3) The results of NMA show that the collaboration patterns between owners and contractors have become complex and diverse over time, consisting mainly of sparse binary collaboration patterns and tight multiparty collaboration patterns. Multiparty collaboration patterns are increasingly present in the network, making the network more locally clustered. This indicates that more and more organizations form multiparty collaboration networks with other organizations when participating in new projects, laying the foundation for future participation in the fierce competition in the

construction market. Organizations with only a binary cooperation model can also draw inspiration from this finding that they need to establish broader cooperative relationships with other organizations by contracting more projects.

This study brings the following knowledge contributions. First, this study enriches the existing body of knowledge on owner–contractor collaborative relationships by shifting the focus from one-off and short-term cooperation in a specific project to the collaborative relationship network at the industry level. Second, the evolution mechanism of the owner–contractor industry-level network is studied from a dynamic network perspective, which expands the study of the organizational network in the construction field and fills the gap in the research on the owner–contractor collaborative network. Third, the findings provide valuable insights into understanding the evolution of China's owner–contractor collaborative relationship and provide a basis for collaborative network governance and organizational collaboration strategy formulations. Fourth, this study proposes a method, which combines SNA and NMA to reveal the characteristics and evolution of the network's overall macro-structure and local micro-structure, providing a research idea for mining cooperation information from industry-level project-based social networks. The interdisciplinary network motif concept is introduced to characterize the local relationship patterns of the network and collaboration mechanisms of subgroups, and SNA is used to explore the network's overall characteristics and nodes' position. SNA and NMA complement each other and advance the understanding of the network properties and structural embeddedness. The method and ideas in this study can also be used to explore the collaborative relationships between stakeholders in the construction industry of other countries.

Although the study brings the above contributions, there are still some limitations. First, we only studied the collaborative network of owners and contractors based on the data of the NQEA project in China. In the future, data sources can be expanded for more in-depth research. Second, we only focused on the collaborative relationship between owners and contractors. However, a construction project involves many participants, such as subcontractors and designers. Future studies can include these stakeholders to better understand the collaborative relationships between different stakeholders. Third, we only discovered the three-node subgroups and four-node subgroups; however, some large projects may involve more owners and contractors. The structure of more node subgroups can be further explored in the future.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, F.W. and M.C.; methodology, F.W.; software, F.W.; validation, M.C. and X.C.; data curation, F.W. and X.C.; writing—original draft preparation, F.W.; writing—review and editing, M.C. and X.C.; visualization, F.W. and X.C.; supervision, M.C.; funding acquisition, M.C. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research was funded by The National Social Science Fund of China, grant No. 22BJY232.

**Data Availability Statement:** Data sharing not applicable.

**Acknowledgments:** We are thankful to the editor and anonymous referees for their valuable comments and guidance.

**Conflicts of Interest:** On behalf of all co-authors, the corresponding author states that there are no conflict of interest.

#### **References**


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