Identifying organizational competencies in project oriented companies: An evolutionary approach

Building on the work of Prahalad and Hamel (1990), many methodologies have been proposed in the strategic management literature for the identification of organizational level core competencies (Bakker et al., 1994; Tampoe, 1994; Gallon et al., 1995; Coates et al., 1997; Marino, 1996 and Javidan, 1998). All of them have two major drawbacks: i) they do not take into account the path dependent nature of organizational level core competencies (OLCCs) and ii) are not operationalized for a project - oriented company context like that of construction. The methodology proposed here supplements existing ones, by addressing the evolutionary dimension of OLCC development, taking under consideration path dependency and idiosyncrasy issues. In addition, the incorporation of management of projects theory (King, 1988; Artto and Dietrich, 2004; Jamieson and Morris, 2004; Morris, 2004) into the proposed methodological framework operationalizes it for the project-oriented company (Gareis, 2004) nature of construction majors.