Promoting Owners’ BIM Adoption Behaviors to Achieve Sustainable Project Management

Although building information modeling (BIM) has a promising future in the architecture, engineering and construction industry, its wider adoption and implementation is desired. Grounded with a technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework and the theory of technology acceptance model (TAM), this study extracted “social influence”, “organizational support”, “BIM technical features”, and “government BIM policies” as four key external antecedents—in reference to the particular BIM practices in China—and proposed a model to predict project owners’ BIM adoption behaviors. To test the proposed model, structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis was applied for configuration analyses on a sample of 188 project owners from the Chinese construction industry. Results show that BIM technical features, and government BIM policies have positive effects on perceived usefulness, but social influence and organizational support have no significant influence on perceived usefulness. Furthermore, both social influence and BIM technical features have positive effects on perceived ease of use, while organizational support and government BIM policies have no significant influence on perceived ease of use. Attitude plays a significant intermediary role among perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and behavior intention. Additionally, attitude significantly affects behavior intention, and behavior intention can also affect BIM adoption behavior. This study is the first attempt to investigate project owners’ behaviors toward BIM adoption and the findings are expected to provide a better understanding of the essential elements of project owners’ BIM adoption behaviors and guide industry practitioners in developing proper strategies to achieve more effective BIM implementation.