Exploring the technology-organization-environment configurations to enhance stakeholder collaboration in the off-site construction projects

Stakeholder collaboration is critical in empowering off-site construction (OSC) projects to reduce the cost overrun, conflicts and quality problems. Prior studies have explored the factors affecting stakeholder collaboration but focused on the net effects, ignoring their interaction relations. Our study aims to explore the configuration conditions to enhance stakeholder collaboration in OSC projects using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). 103 valid questionnaires are collected to conduct fsQCA to explore the configurational conditions to achieve the high stakeholder collaboration. The findings reveal that there are no necessary conditions as a bottleneck factor constraining stakeholder collaboration emergence in the OSC projects. Three equivalent configurational conditions are identified to achieve high stakeholder collaboration, referring to environment-driven organizational configuration, technology-organizational configuration, and organizational-driven environment configuration. Our study enriches the literature on the antecedent identification of stakeholder collaboration in the OSC project. It also expands the underlying mechanisms between antecedents and stakeholder collaboration from the configurational perspective. Meanwhile, our study provides practical guidance for policymakers and project managers to make decisions by emphasizing the interaction effects of different project governance mechanisms.