Purpose
Business consortiums for temporary projects have limited time and less attention from individual organisations concerning leadership alignment. Recognising the need to study relationships in alliances, this study aims to identify the fundamental organisational beliefs perceived by the leaders in a construction business consortium and relate them to the companies’ belief system as conceptualised by Simons.
Design/methodology/approach
The research adopts a positivist qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews, literature review and document analysis through a case study in a temporary business consortium formed by three large construction companies.
Findings
It was possible to verify alignment between the beliefs of the consortium and its leadership and infer that the flow of beliefs can be affected by the duration of the project. The research underlines the importance of the belief system within an organisation and how differences can cause internal conflicts, whilst alignment can improve competitiveness. The authors concluded that conflicts emerge due to a lack of alignment regarding the business’ core beliefs and the presence of different cultures and the duration of the project. Also, it was possible to create two different propositions for future studies regarding the project timeframe and improve competitiveness with the alignment of beliefs.
Social implications
Whilst there is academic literature that identifies challenges in successful project execution attributed to the misalignment of teams at a cultural level, organisations today still largely neglect the importance of team alignment. A better understanding of beliefs across organisations could have significant impact on social aspects resulting in improvements concerning projects timescales and quality of deliverables.
Originality/value
The main contribution is to explain how beliefs flow from individual parties to a temporary business consortium. This research addresses the lack of empirical studies relating to the alignment of temporary projects whilst providing recommendations to inform future research.
This research aimed to analyse the characteristics of scientific publications on the theme of outsourcing in Brazil through a bibliometric analysis and cooperation networks. The sample was composed of 268 articles and classified according to the year of publication, journal of publication, research method and number of citations. It was possible to verify that most publications were concentrated in the last ten years. The Bibliometric Laws analysis identified that most authors published just one article about outsourcing; 33% of publications are focused on 16 journals, and the word outsourcing is the most used as a keyword. The authors also identified that few researchers cooperate, and the relationship between authors is weak. The main contribution of the research is the compilation of more than 30 years of discussions. With coverage of a significant number of databases, the authors make a substantial contribution to future research by consolidating presently available information on the topic of outsourcing.
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