The dynamic interplay of capability strengths and weaknesses: investigating, страница 23

[1] Resources are the tangible and intangible assets that firms control and capabilities are the ability to perform ‘a coordinated set of tasks utilizing organizational resources’ (Helfat and Peteraf, 2003: 999). While for the sake of parsimony we primarily employ the terminology of capability here forward, the logic is valid for resources.

[2] Despite not creating advantage, a capability at parity is important. Capabilities at parity offer more value than capabilities which represent weakness, but not as much as capabilities in positions of strength. Moreover, they are likely needed by the firm to be competitive. We thank a thoughtful reviewer for this important idea.

[3] A formal hypothesis for Cell I is not offered because it is a null hypothesis.

[4] No merchant or power relations exist between the Banque de France and the interviewed companies.

[5] Results with a one-year lag are substantively the same as those reported.

[6] Both of these variables satisfy the criteria for representing a normal distribution.

[7] Because respondents identified the subset of major competitors to which to compare their firm, there is a chance of inconsistent scores. However, three different empirical procedures address this concern. First, we tested, for each industry, the reliability of the six capability scales to measure the consistency among respondents. Cronbach’s Alpha scores with a mean score of 0.68 indicate acceptable internal consistency. As a robustness check, we also run our analyses only with industries with Alpha >0.70, with no substantive changes in the outcomes. Second, closer examination of the mean industry standard deviation per strength (0.69–0.80) and weakness (0.41–0.79) suggest that responses were consistent. Moreover, the responses per industry do not deviate from normal distributions. We thank a thoughtful reviewer for suggesting we examine these attributes.

[8] To test the robustness of our results, we examined several alternative operationalizations. First, we kept our spline function set at zero but instead of following the Deephouse (1999) approach, we simply summed strengths and weaknesses. Second, we explored an empirically, rather than theoretically, set spline

[9] To ensure that the results for H1 and H2 were not driven by one of the underlining capabilities, we analyzed each spline specification per capability (before they were operationalized as sets). These results show that the outcomes for the sets are not the result of a single underlying capability, nor were any of the individual specifications counter to theory.

[10] The median split approach produced similar results with the low strength/low weakness group as the comparison.

[11] Please see Footnotes 6 and 7.

[12] We thank a very insightful reviewer for offering us this comment.