Decisions That Build: Strategic Decision-Making and Its Influence on Construction Business Performance in New Zealand

Abstract

The New Zealand construction industry, while central to national infrastructure and economic development, continues to grapple with persistent performance challenges rooted in weak strategic governance and fragmented decision-making processes. This study examines the relationship between strategic decision-making and organisational performance within the New Zealand construction sector, addressing a gap that construction management scholarship has largely left unattended. The study draws on survey data from construction professionals across diverse organisational sizes, project types, and regions in New Zealand, employing Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) as its analytical approach. The analysis identifies four significant predictors of construction business performance: strategic decision formulation, strategic decision implementation practices, strategic decision evaluation, and financial strength. Workforce capabilities, by contrast, did not demonstrate a statistically significant relationship with performance outcomes. This nuanced finding challenges prevailing assumptions about the primacy of human capital in construction performance models. The structural model achieved strong explanatory power, confirming the robustness of the proposed framework. These findings offer theoretically coherent, empirically supported insights into strategic performance determinants among mid-sized construction organisations in New Zealand. The voluntary sampling design and modest sample size of 102 respondents define the inferential boundaries of these conclusions.