Grey Systems Theory

The organizational capital is one of the important components of the intellectual capital. the organizational capital is an infrastructure in term of organizational successes so that it plays a vital role in achieving the goals of organization. Managing and directing “Organizational Capital” entails identification and measurement of its attributes. Although the literature on the intellectual capital is rich, the review shows that few researches have studied the organizational capital models and the related attributes. Hence, at first, this study aims to collect the organizational capital attributes through reviewing the literature and classify them as a comprehensive model. Then, a Multiple Attribute Decision Making (MADM) approach in uncertanity situation has been utilized in order to prioritize and rank the classified attributes by gathering the opinions of experts. In this study, the Grey systems theory has been used for the first time as a method to deal with uncertainty inherent in the in the organizational capital measurement. Whereas the presented comprehensive model can be applied in different situations and industries, it seems that this model may have different attribute weights with regard to the nature of organizations’ activity and internal and external conditions of the specified industry. Finally, the proposed methodology has been utilized in the petroleum industry in Iran and prioritization procedure and ranking results have been illustrated step by step.

Strategic management contexts usually define a couple of activities, including preparing a mission statement, which is one of the essential parts in developing the strategic plan of an organization. Numerous researches in the strategic management literature have expressed the attributes of an effectively written mission statement for a firm in general. Although the corporate mission statement and its components vary from industry to industry, none of the researchers have specifically studied the components of a corporate mission statement in the petroleum industry. In this study, the general components of the corporate mission statement were extracted and listed based on the strategic management literature review. Then, the most important components of the corporate mission statement specific to the petroleum industry were selected using the industry experts’ opinions. The grey systems theory was utilized to aggregate the expert judgments that are qualitative in nature. Fourteen components for the petroleum industry corporate mission statement were selected as the research results. Whether developing a new business or reformulating direction for an ongoing company in the petroleum industry, these specific components should be included in the content of the corporate mission statement.