Research on the Influence of Risk on Construction Project Performance: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Knowledge on the influence of risk on project performance is an important part of risk management. Previous studies have concentrated on this area to identify risks in aspects of project performance such as cost and schedule. However, rare reviews have been conducted to fully report on the research on the influence of risk on project performance. For this reason, to identify and analyze such researches in these areas a systematic review was conducted in this paper. More specifically, 54 relevant articles were identified and classified into three groups according to their research contents; the research contents in each article and the research methods were reviewed, and the 13 most frequent research methods were also identified and discussed. It was found that most of the previous researches concentrated on developing tools or approaches to assess the influence of risk on project performance. Additionally, researches focused on risk factors’ identification or risk interdependency modeling were also common, along with researches that investigated the cause of poor project performance, evaluated risk impact on cost contingency, discussed the risk response actions, and discussed what enables high-risk projects to yield a high return. However, four gaps were identified from these researches, namely: a need for improving the accuracy in quantitative research of the influence of risk on project performance; a need for novel research methodologies for conducting more accurate risk influence assessments; taking into consideration project participants’ decision-making in their researches; and creating a framework that treats the risk influence assessment as a whole system. Besides that, since this research only focused on two project objectives (cost and schedule), recommendations for future research include expanding the focus to more project objectives.