Conflicts and management styles in the Sri Lankan commercial building sector

The Sri Lankan commercial building industry is currently experiencing a construction boom after thirty years of civil war. Creating a dispute free environment through well conflict management is one of the main ways to keep the continuous demand and development of construction. However, the Sri Lankan construction sector is arranged in such a way that they directly approach the dispute resolution rather than avoiding the dispute initially through proper conflict management. The aim of this research is to understand the prevailing conflict management styles in Sri Lankan commercial building industry from the main stakeholders’ perspective. The dual concern theory is applied to this study as a theory foundation. Four cases are selected for this study with the intention of conducting meetings with three main stakeholders of each case who represented client, consultants and contractors respectively. The research findings reveal that compromising is the most common conflict management style used by the industry. Forcing style obtained the second place in the ranking whereas obliging and avoiding received third and fourth places. This study is conducted to provide a full picture of conflicts faced by the Sri Lankan commercial building industry and their proper management so that the future projects will use this information to diminish the destructive effects of conflict situations and provide a real value for money. Key Words: Conflict Management; Dual Concern Theory; Commercial Building Sector; Sri Lank

Determining the optimal size of small molecule mixtures for high throughput NMR screening

High-throughput screening (HTS) using NMR spectroscopy has become a common component of the drug discovery effort and is widely used throughout the pharmaceutical industry. NMR provides additional information about the nature of small molecule-protein interactions compared to traditional HTS methods. In order to achieve comparable efficiency, small molecules are often screened as mixtures in NMR-based assays. Nevertheless, an analysis of the efficiency of mixtures and a corresponding determination of the optimum mixture size (OMS) that minimizes the amount of material and instrumentation time required for an NMR screen has been lacking. A model for calculating OMS based on the application of the hypergeometric distribution function to determine the probability of a \u27hit\u27 for various mixture sizes and hit rates is presented. An alternative method for the deconvolution of large screening mixtures is also discussed. These methods have been applied in a high-throughput NMR screening assay using a small, directed library