UC Berkeley

Meeting quality expectations is vital to the successful delivery of construction projects. Still, the levels of quality achieved in practice are often unsatisfactory, resulting in rework or acceptance of poor work. Quality management research has relied on statistical process control, tolerance management, and standards development. In recent years, though, attention has been shifting toward theoretical and philosophical foundations of quality, and the role people play in defining quality expectations and achieving them. Behavior-Based Quality (BBQ) embraces the human factor (e.g., beliefs, principles) in the management of quality. BBQ proposes improving the delivery of quality by focusing on people’s behaviors to foster alignment and minimize quality issues. Anecdotal evidence in this research shows people understand BBQ’s intent but struggle to figure out what it all encompasses and how to implement it. A more systemic view of BBQ, providing a description of what BBQ entails, could facilitate its understanding and adoption. Yet, what such a system might look like hasn’t been defined yet. This motivated this research.In this dissertation, I present a Behavior-Based Quality System (BBQS) and describe its theoretical and philosophical foundations to deliver quality outcomes. I designed the BBQS on the foundations of Lean and psychological safety. Inspired by the Last Planner® System (LPS) benchmark, I identified the following features of the BBQS: (1) functions needed to deliver quality, (2) presuppositions about the world where these functions are performed, (3) the behaviors needed to perform the functions and the principles on which they are based, (4) the processes used to perform the system functions, and (5) methods and tools that facilitate executing the processes. Inspired by studies that explore the construct of psychological safety and its impact on teams and their outcomes in industries such as healthcare and technology, I incorporated this construct across the BBQS features, from fostering psychological safety as a principle in the system to reporting mistakes for learning as a step in the quality delivery process. Using design science research, I developed the BBQS in four iterations. First, I conducted exploratory studies where I analyzed the construct of psychological safety in two construction project teams and the use of BBQ to manage quality in one of them. Second, I analyzed responses collected from practitioners who had applied BBQ to some extent and shared their perspectives of what worked well for them and the behaviors they observed within their teams. Third, I conducted a retrospective case study to learn what a team did to deliver quality on a project known by the general contractor participating in the research as one of their best-in-class projects. Fourth and last, I conducted longitudinal studies on two projects in parallel; I used one as a control case and implemented BBQS on the other and then compared their outcomes. I argue that implementing the BBQS could improve (1) the behaviors desired for quality, and in doing so, can indirectly improve (2) psychological safety and (3) team performance. These three are my research variables. To test this argument, I collected information to assess these variables and examined their relationship. I found that psychological safety is positively associated with behaviors desired for quality, and these, in turn, are positively associated with team performance. I also found that the behaviors desired for quality mediate between psychological safety and team performance. BBQS led to a statistically significant increase in the behaviors for quality in the project where it was implemented. While I also observed an increase in psychological safety and team performance in that project, the difference was not statistically significant. A question remains open: would a larger sample allow to observe a statistically significant increase in psychological safety and team performance when implementing the BBQS? Furthermore, I analyzed my research variables by staff and craft members and found a gap that needs to be closed. On the projects studied, staff members reported higher levels of psychological safety and higher scores for the desired behaviors than craft members. Through the implementation of BBQS, I was able to reduce that gap by increasing psychological safety and fostering behaviors for quality among craft members. This research is a first step toward understanding the impact of the BBQS on a construction project team’s psychological safety, behaviors for quality, and performance. This research contributes to knowledge by augmenting the literature on quality management and psychological safety, proposing a psychometric tool to assess construction teams’ psychological safety and the behaviors desired for quality, closing the gap between staff and craft psychological safety and their behaviors for quality, and presenting a system that highlights the human factor in the delivery of quality and guides teams implementing a behavioral approach to quality. Future research can further refine the BBQS features, design simulations to train participants in the BBQS, and deepen understanding of the relationship between psychological safety, behaviors for quality, and performance, in addition to better understanding the factors influencing psychological safety in construction teams, and the managerial actions that these teams can take to foster psychological safety.