Importance Level of Construction Managers’ Technical Competency Across Different Contractors’ Demographics in Malaysia

¹ Faculty of Architecture, Planning, and Survey, University Teknologi MARA, 40450 Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia
² Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, 86400 Parit Raja, Johor, Malaysia

^* Corresponding author: hairuddin81@gmail.com

Abstract

It is undeniable that construction managers play a significant role within construction phase, especially when they are representing construction contractor, one of the key stakeholders within construction project’s realm. Reliance towards their technical competency is very much needed for a successfulness of a construction project. Unfortunately, a lot of recurring issues pertaining to their technical incompetency are shrouding the industry. Non-existence of term of reference for construction manager’s technical competency profile is dictated as a major setback. Thus, a dedicated and comprehensive research exploration is conducted in order to bridge the gap through establishment of particular competency. Hence, in this instalment, the authors postulated a question of ‘how?’ which pillars on items’ importance level and correlation among different contractors’ demographics. Initially, data screening processes over outliers test, reliability test, and normality test were conducted. After that, the importance of technical competency for construction manager was analysed based on their central tendency (i.e. means). Finally, Spearman correlation analysis is directed towards observed ranks from diverse contractors’ demographics. In a nutshell, data was free from any extreme outlier and reported high reliability value. However, data was measured as non-normal in nature. Meanwhile, through means, majority of macro items (16 items) were in a range of important (4.00) to very important (5.00). Towards the end, findings for Spearman correlation analysis were mostly leaning towards moderate and strong association’s strength across different clusters of diverse contractors’ demographics. Nevertheless, there were evidences that major variability of findings for both tests is exhibited through contractors’ grades. Therefore, succeeding in-depth quantitative analysis is paramount in order to pin-point significant values onto each individual item.