Organizational Factors That Drive to BIM Effectiveness: Technological Learning, Collaborative Culture, and Senior Management Support

Abstract

Senior management support is a key dynamic capacity for design companies in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry, given the fact that they must identify changes in the competitive environment, which are increasingly becoming more and more technological. In addition, senior management support is obliged to react in the most efficient and effective way. Currently, the project design teams that have adopted building information modeling (BIM) are subject to constant changes in the technological environment, of which the activity is influenced by the behavior of senior management support. This research focuses on this issue by analyzing the role played by the variables of technological learning, collaborative culture, and support provided by senior management as precedents of BIM technology effectiveness. The data set has been obtained from 92 AEC companies in Spain. Using partial least squares (PLS), this research finds evidence of the previously mentioned relationships and the existence of partial mediation effects generated by technological learning and collaborative culture within the support of senior management in BIM technology effectiveness. In addition, this model achieves an appropriate level of predictive validation to explain BIM technology effectiveness in engineering project designs. The results highlight that senior management support needs to promote a technological learning and collaborative culture to improve the technological capabilities. The contribution and original value of the paper is to provide empirical evidence that the effectiveness of BIM factors in project design teams is influenced by the behavior of top management support.