A review of empirical research on dynamic competitive strategy, страница 4

In addition to these antecedents of competitive strategy that relate to the environment in which a firm does business, there are contingencies that are part and parcel of the organization itself. One of these, organizational performance, is so central to research in dynamic competitive strategy that we consider it separately. We include in this subcategory the historical development of a firm's financial or non-financial performance, and the effect of performance on subsequent strategies.

There are several other organizational contingencies that exert influence on subsequent dynamic competitive strategy. The strategic context encompasses a firm's past corporate (Hoskisson and Johnson 1992) and competitive strategy (Washington and Ventresca 2004). Organization structure refers to the status of, and changes in, top management team (Barker et al. 2001), pay structure (Carpenter 2000), governance mechanisms and board processes (Golden and Zajac 2001) and size (Glen and Hambrick 1995). Finally, the organizational resources and capabilities subcategory captures the paths and positions of a firm's tangible and intangible resources, skills and organizational capabilities (Cockburn et al. 2000).

All the descriptions up to this point relate to antecedents. We come now to the crux of the matter, dynamic competitive strategy. In fact, the literature covered in this review looks at competitive strategy at two different levels, the first being general strategic actions and orientation, which captures the overall strategic posture of the firm, either by focusing on a broader set of strategic decision variables such as R&D, investment, marketing, and product and market scope (Caves and Ghemawat 1992), or by relying on broader constructs of competitive strategy such as differentiation and cost leadership strategies (Kotha and Nair 1995). We further suggest for the purpose of this review that the second level can be broken down by product or market strategy, functional strategy or cooperative strategy. Product and market strategy refers to competitive strategy decisions about the product portfolio, including decisions on target markets (Greve 2000), new product introductions and market entries (Baum and Korn 1996). Functional strategy refers to how the general competitive strategy is realized in distinct functional areas such as R&D, marketing or production. Finally, we look at cooperative strategy as a separate category because of its importance in the literature. It refers to the degree to which a firm relies for its strategies on inter-firm cooperation in one form or the other, including alliances (Eisenhardt and Schoonhoven 1996).

The environmental and organizational antecedents identified earlier, in combination with the strategic actions and adaptations of the firm, lead to performance-related and non-performance-related outcomes. If we look at strategic activity as a dynamic and recurring event, the outcomes of competitive strategic actions are the setting in which the next iteration of strategic activity is performed. Therefore, outcome factors, with the exception of the regulatory context and general environmental characteristics, are identical to antecedent factors. We exclude general environmental characteristics on the assumption that they evolve largely independently of individual firm activities. Furthermore, we do not include the regulatory context as a direct outcome because: (1) while firms can try to influence their regulatory context favorably through political processes (e.g. by lobbying), these activities are outside the traditional core of how a firm competes in each of its businesses in the marketplace; (2) to be complete in covering the regulatory context would require including literature that is outside the scope of typical strategic management journals; and (3) this literature offers little synergy with the remaining parts of our framework (see e.g. Grier et al. 1991 for further references on the political process).