Evaluating the relationship between Socio-Cultural Diversity and Collaboration among Project Teams in Johannesburg, South Africa

The built environment sector is characterised by collaborative working relationships, which are traditionally adversarial, fragmented and incapable of delivering for its customers. The diversity of teams partly contributes to projects not being initiated, executed, and completed within a specific scope of time, budget, and quality, since collaboration between individual and alliance members could be affected. There is limited literature evincing this relationship, which could contribute to improving project success. Therefore, the objective of the study was to establish the relationship between team members' attributes (including socio-cultural diversity, level of association, social interaction) and collaboration. A quantitative approach was adopted to conduct the study. The study amassed data using a questionnaire distributed among eighty respondents, comprising engineers, supervisors, foremen, contractors, project managers, and other decision-makers in engineering, construction, and consulting companies in Midrand, Sandton, and Johannesburg in South Africa. Inferential statistical analysis was undertaken using Pearson's correlation to examine the relationship between team attributes and collaboration. Findings revealed positive and medium to relatively high significant relationships between the variables, indicating that the more the level of association, diversity, and social interaction among team members, the more collaboration among them. The findings from the study are envisaged to be beneficial to construction and project managers in managing teams with diverse social backgrounds and orientations. It was concluded that team collaboration could be maintained even though high social and cultural diversity exists.