Behavioural perceptions of design and construction engineers

ABSTRACT

Hemisphericity in behaviour studies is the role and dominance of right bran/left brain in the human brain, each side of which has varying roles and characteristics, thereby leading to different thinking orientations in the human. A study was conducted to measure the hemisphericity orientation of construction and design engineers in a large public construction organization. We know from literature that people of different hemisphericity orientations have unlike personalities and dissimilar perspectives of specific situations. The essential characteristics of hemisphericity as established in literature are presented and used in analysing the organization. From this study of engineers, it was seen that construction engineers in the organization, State Department of Engineering Construction (SDEC), are predominantly left-brained while design engineers are predominantly right-brained. This difference in orientation partially explains why the design and construction engineers at SDEC are unable to see eye-to-eye in issues concerning implementation of drawings. Left hemisphere dominant engineers are also seen to desire more organizational changes than their right hemisphere dominant counterparts. Ideally, researchers believe that a 50–50 distribution of hemisphericities in large organizations is desirable. Details, analysis, and recommendations are presented in the paper.