Study on the Impact of Trust and Contract Governance on Project Management Performance in the Whole Process Consulting Project—Based on the SEM and fsQCA Methods

In order to strengthen the cooperation ability between the owner and the consultant and improve the project management performance of the whole process engineering consulting, this study firstly introduces knowledge sharing as a mediator variable and constructs a theoretical model between trust and contract governance—knowledge sharing—project management performance. A structural equation model was then used to empirically test the questionnaire data. The results show that contract governance indirectly promotes project performance through the intermediary of explicit knowledge sharing, and trust indirectly promotes project performance through the intermediary of knowledge sharing (explicit knowledge sharing and tacit knowledge sharing). Based on the above, for further analysis of the complex antecedent configuration and improvement path that affect management performance, fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis was used for group analysis with contract governance, trust, explicit knowledge sharing, and tacit knowledge sharing as conditional variables and project management performance as the outcome variable. The results show that there are two parallel paths that can improve the whole process engineering consulting project management performance: contract governance*explicit knowledge sharing*tacit knowledge sharing→project management performance and contract governance*trust*explicit knowledge sharing→project management performance. Finally, through analysis of the research results, it is suggested that in whole process engineering consulting projects, the owner and the consultant should actively promote the willingness and behavior of the consultant to share knowledge based on therational use of trust and contract governance, to better improve project management performance.

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