Purpose The purpose of this article is to identify and explore pertinent conflicting factors in construction projects; which would be helpful for project planners and implementers in assessing and taking proactive measures for reducing the adverse effect of conflict. Design/methodology/approach To achieve the study objectives, a 43‐item questionnaire survey in a five‐point Likert scale was carried out to collect professionals' experience on conflicting activities in Korean construction projects. Responses from 124 professionals working for owners, consultants and contractors were analyzed. Furthermore, ten face‐to face interviews were also carried out to ratify the findings from the field survey. Later, analytical hierarchical process method was employed to find out the importance weighting as well as responsible party for the perceived conflicts. Findings This study has found out six critical construction conflicting factors pertinent in Korean context. These factors with importance weighting are: differing site condition (24.1 percent), public interruption (22.5 percent), differences in change order evaluation (21 percent), design errors (17.1 percent), excessive contract quantities variation (8.2) and double meaning of specifications (7.1 percent). The study has revealed that owner (35.6 percent) and consultant (34.18 percent) are mostly responsible parties for conflicts in construction projects. Originality/value As the previous researches have been indicating increase in conflicts in construction field, this paper is very topical at the moment. This work has tried to explore the underlying problems of the construction field. The study provides field level experiences from which the inexperience construction site professionals could learn the instances of conflicts and not repeat the mistakes in their projects.
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