Leadership Strategies for Global Supply Chain Management: The Case of UAE's Construction Sector

The Construction Supply Chain

In contrast to the unilateral, long-term transaction relations representative of the manufacturing supply chain, the construction supply chain is highly complex, diverse and fragmented that involves a multitude of stakeholders participating in dyadic relationships (Rezgui and Miles, 2009). The key stakeholders in the construction supply chain are Developers, Architects/Consultants, Main Contractors, Subcontractors and Suppliers. In a large construction project, the number of organizations involved in the supply chain could run into hundreds, if not thousands. Also, the sector is characterized by one-off contracts and a failure to develop longer-term relationships between stakeholders (Dubois and Gadde, 2000; Briscoe et al., 2001). Moreover, the construction supply chain has a reputation for low-trust and adversarial trading relations between supply chain stakeholders (Korczynski, 1996; Akintoye et al., 2000). For instance, Latham (1994) highlighted the adversarial attitudes that commonly exist between main contractors and their suppliers.