Abstract

Organizational capability plays a critical role in creating and maintaining an organization's competitive advantage. It enables organizations to develop and implement organizational strategies and business models. However, the measurement of the organizational capability to assist the prediction of organizational performance remains a challenging task. It is especially challenging for organizations with limited resources, such as monetary resources, time and the expertise to organizational capability and instrument for measuring organizational capability. The challenge is two-fold. Firstly, organizational capability measurement aims to predict organizational performance rooted in individual performance. However, it is challenging to find a practical framework that links individual performance with organizational performance and guides the organizational capability measurement by considering the individual factors. Secondly, the questionnaire is widely used for measuring individual knowledge, attitudes, emotion and perceptions. However, questionnaire design methods are still very ill-defined processes that the generation of items heavily relies on the experience of experts or the questionnaires designed by other researchers about a similar topic. This research aims to provide an organizational capability state (OCS) model and develop a framework for questionnaire design using a design methodology — Environment Based Design (EBD). The primitive factors for OCS are organizational members’ knowledge, skills and the perception of workload and affect. The questionnaire design framework achieves the OCS measurement by developing a questionnaire for assessing organizational members’ knowledge, skills, perception, affect and goal. With two case studies, the framework of questionnaire design is proved to be effective in questionnaire design. The combination of the OCS model and questionnaire design framework enables a cost-effective and less expert-dependent measurement of organizational capability.