Rethinking leadership to construction partnering projects

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the use of partnering in
construction. Central to any successful partnering arrangement is the change in cultural and
behavioural characteristics towards mutual trust and understanding. According to Schein,
cultural and behavioural characteristics can be shaped and reflected by proper leadership. This
research probes leadership as the response to address complex relationships of behaviour and
culture in large scale partnering projects. This involves understanding, interpreting, explaining
and mapping complex human behaviour. Therefore it is very important to comprehend and
implement a suitable research methodology to carefully extract appropriate information. This
paper justifies the social constructionism stance and case study approach for the leadership
study as the response to address complex relationships challenges of behaviour and culture in
construction partnering projects. For this purpose, the nested approach is used, highlighting
the main facets of the arguments to justify the selection of appropriate research philosophy
and research approach.