PhD Final Thesis April 2013.pdf - Anglia Ruskin Research Online

Thesis Keith Gale 2013‘I think that fact that the KPI system is inherent within the frameworks (whereasthey’re not in our stand alone contracts), means that the contractors are alwayslooking to improve their delivery. You know, if he knows he is going to be markeddown, he’s always happy to make that extra effort. And that will affect his attitudetowards starting, finishing, and you know, sort of lots of things in between. You don’tnecessarily get that on stand alone contracts because, you know, there’s no realreason.’‘the more you work with a contractor the more you get to understand the way theywork, how they price the work, the key staff, what you expect from them, and howyou want the final account to be presented and agreed. They enable both sides tolook at historical performance data related to the project to identify where the clientteam and the contractor team members need to improve. They encourage contractorteams to perform strongly in a chosen area, to gain repeat business, and to not bepenalised.’Regarding incentives – this statement from a participant is noteworthy because nonfinancial incentives are also important to suppliers:‘ actually there is a social side of it. They’re mostly always in the green, but if one ofthem drops to amber they all know about it and there’s a little bit of a loss of face forthem. So there’s a sort of peer pressure in a way to help them keep performing. Andthat’s a really positive thing because it does mean that they are concerned abouttheir service and they are actively engaged in maintaining it.10.9 Summary of qualitative data and connection with hypothesisThe introduction of this chapter stated that the purpose of the interview process wasto capture information from sociological group case study participants. Shared viewsof a sociological class represent the culture of that group (Levine and Moreland,1991) and use of this theoretical basis provides a method to elicit themes fromparticipants.Qualitative methods selected for analysis of interview transcripts comprise wordfrequency, node theme classification and meta-synthesis in order to elicit individualparticipant statements and these are aggregated into group views. Interpolation of theaggregated group views are designed to represent predominant views of thesociological group class provided that saturation has occurred (Guest et al, 2006).249