Strategic alliances for the Sri Lankan construction industry - a study of best fit partners

Abstract

To be sustainable with the fast-moving business environment, currently most of the organisations use strategic alliance as a key strategy. This is indeed essential for the firms in the construction sector that operates in a high-risk and competitive business environment. Simply, strategic alliance is an agreement between the business entities with the purpose of achieving the unreachable benefits/advantages which cannot be attained when they are separate. Selecting the suitable partner for strategic alliance is the extremely important task in the formation of strategic alliances and have significant influence on the success of strategic alliance. However, by far selection of most suitable alliancing parties for the formation of strategic alliance in the construction sector is largely overlooked. Hence, this study is focused on identifying the top most suitable alliancing partners for the Sri Lankan construction projects. To collect required data, structured questionnaires were distributed amongst the key parties of the construction sector on the basis of their level knowledge on the concept of strategic alliance (i.e. engineering consultant, main-contractor, and subcontractor). Findings revealed that the alliancing between the main-contractor and sub-contractor would improve the performance of Sri Lankan construction industry and thus derived as the most suitable strategic alliancing partners.