Companies struggle against complex and dynamic conditions in order to survive in their business settings. Being in the knowledge era, learning has been accepted as one of the main sources of sustainable competitive advantage. Organizational learning (OL) is a set of activities to obtain organizational memory (OM) by acquiring, sharing, interpreting, integrating and institutionalizing knowledge. OM is exploited by the companies in strategic decision-making process, which makes OL a critical concept.
The major objective of this study is to explore how construction companies create OM and how they exploit this asset in strategic decision-making process. In this context, an interview study is conducted with eight large Turkish construction companies and OM perceptions of each company are presented as case studies. This survey revealed the strengths and weaknesses in terms of OL competence. One of the key outputs is that companies are successful at acquiring and storing knowledge but they are not familiar with decision support systems
(DSSs) that benefit from OM. Such systems enable OL by assisting decision makers in processing, assessing, integrating and organizing knowledge. To meet the requirements of the industry, a DSS is proposed to aid construction companies in international market entry decisions. This tool is generated under a software package by adopting case-based reasoning (CBR) as the problem solving approach, which finds solutions to new problems based on the past experiences. The model is developed by the acquisition of past real international project data as input information. The model produces two outputs that are indicators of attractiveness of a project and competitiveness of a company, which are the key decision criteria in international market entry problem.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:METU/oai:etd.lib.metu.edu.tr:http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12604852/index.pdf |
| Date | 01 April 2004 |
| Creators | Ozorhon, Beliz |
| Contributors | Dikmen, Irem |
| Publisher | METU |
| Source Sets | Middle East Technical Univ. |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | M.S. Thesis |
| Format | text/pdf |
| Rights | To liberate the content for public access |
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