A review of empirical research on dynamic competitive strategy, страница 12

The timing of strategic actions and the consequences of those actions on organizational performance have received considerably less attention in contingency studies on dynamic competitive strategy. As far as we know, only Lee and Grewal (2004) explicitly incorporate response speed as an independent variable. They study technological change by looking at the introduction of the Internet and find that both the type and speed of response positively affect performance, suggesting that adaptation speed remains a promising variable for future contingency studies.

A relatively small number of contingency studies have studied how the path chosen for strategic adaptation affects subsequent organizational performance. First, Barnett and Freeman (2001) show that the simultaneous introduction of too many products following a technological change will have a detrimental effect on performance, as such an effort causes significant disruption in proven routines. This finding is confirmed by Jones (2003), who finds a curvilinear relationship between new product introductions after radical technological change and organizational performance. In a study of entrepreneurial computer firms, Mosakowski (1993) also suggests that the strategic adaptation of a focus or customer service strategy will force firms to undergo a costly resource accumulation process. However, there was no evidence that this process will reduce organizational performance during the transformation process.

A wide variety of longitudinal studies explore the relationship between competitive strategy or specific strategic moves and organizational performance, which do not focus on specific contingency variables. One important subgroup of studies takes a strategic group perspective, and explores performance differences across strategic groups. While strategic group structure, despite some contradictory evidence, seems to have performance implications in cross-sectional studies, their stability and evolution over time are considerably less researched (Zúniga-Vicente et al. 2004). Because past strategies create path dependencies and enduring mobility barriers, and hence limit subsequent mobility between groups (Lee 2003), there is evidence that some performance differences between strategic groups do exist and persist over time (Fiegenbaum and Thomas 1990). However, as strategic group structure changes (Cool and Schendel 1987), some of these relationships break down, limiting the explanatory power of strategic groups to stable ‘strategic time periods’, and thus giving a more or less retrospective perspective.

Furthermore, several other factors also associated with existing and stable performance differentials seem to undergo significant changes over time. For example, even if performance does not change, neither the number (Olusoga et al. 1995) nor the membership of firms within groups (Fiegenbaum and Thomas 1990) necessarily remains stable over time. In addition, although performance differentials between groups can be attributed to differences in advertising or manufacturing strategies, these variables also seem to be unstable in respect to both the type and magnitude of the effect (Olusoga et al. 1995).

Extending these findings, Cool and Diericks (1993) suggest that the stability of performance differentials between strategic groups is not accurately described by group structure alone, as the relative positions of firms vis-à-vis each other may change. This in turn can change the intensity of competitive rivalry between or within groups, even if the aggregate industry group structure remains intact.