The foundation for successful collaboration in the detailed design phase of construction projects is aligning the knowledge and views of designers and contractors. In such design development meetings, architects, consultants, main contractor, subcontractors, and client representatives face several challenges in moving from conceptual designs to a documented set of shop drawings. This phase represents the peak of participants' interactions including exploring and refining design solutions, explaining and reflecting on each other's ideas and concerns, and negotiating design and cost decisions. Collaboration is often presented in the literature as practices that provide the platform for successful interaction and the achieved outcomes, but with minimal concern about actual interactive processes. Theoretically, collaboration has been studied from a variety of perspectives grouped into normative and practice-based approaches that have enhanced the research field at the inter-organisational macro-level, but there is no consensus on a framework to measure collaboration empirically in the field. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore the common themes describing interdisciplinary collaboration in the literature and develop a framework explaining the conceptual relationship between them. The proposed framework provides a preliminary step towards understanding the dynamic nature and stages of the interdisciplinary collaboration in the detailed design phase.

Collaboration in construction projects has become a primary requirement in common delivery methods, especially in the detailed design phase to achieve value for the client. The involvement of multiple organisations, such as the client, architects, design consultants, project managers, contractors, and subcontractors, increases the complexity of implementing successful collaboration. Recent studies have focused on the financial aspect of collaboration but undervalued the social dimension which reflects behavioural actions that can lead to goal misalignment. There is less known about the highly dynamic nature of collaboration at a project level between participants with different views, objectives, and working practices. Through a study of two interdisciplinary teams in the detailed design phase of large-scale construction projects, participants' perceptions of collaboration were analysed to reveal that participants have different ways of viewing their collaboration, ranging from facilitation factors, working processes, and outcomes. The study advances the theory of collaboration in design management by adopting an inter-organisational practice-based perspective to assess collaboration. The findings suggest a more tailored management approach based on understanding the processes and outcomes and regular monitoring of the behaviour actions for collaboration to succeed.