Uncertain Environment, Sustainable Advantage

In the 21 st century, with the acceleration of internationalization, technological progress and increasingly fierce glpbal competition, enterprises find it increasingly difficult to obtain and maintain competitive advantage. As China is undergoing economic and social transformation, Chinese enterprises f are acing extremely compressed environment in space and time: market transformation, social transformation, consumption upgrading, technology revolution, the global competition, and so many forces are intertwined, making Chinese enterprises facing more intricate and turbulent environment, the acquisition and maintenance of continuing advantages are becoming more difficult.In theoretical research, the construction of enterprises' sustainable advantages in uncertain business environment has been the central topic of strategic management. Now there are three perspectives to explain the source of sustainable advantage: exogenous perspective, which can be divided into static and dynamic exogenous concept, the former including population ecology theory, contingency theory, systems theory, industrial organization theory, the latter including the evolution theory, etc.; endogenous perspective, which can be divided into static and dynamic endogenous concept, the former including the resource-based view, core capability theory, the latter including the strategic choice theory, innovative theories, etc. and the comprehensive view, which again can be divided into static and dynamic comprehensive concept, the former including SWOT analysis, the latter including co-evolutionary theory, dynamic capabilities theory, etc.Now it is widely accepted that exogenous, endogenous, or static comprehensive view is difficult to explain the sources of corporate sustainable advantage. Though the dynamic comprehensive view are thought to be with better explanation power, they are still a little too abstract and lacks of concrete instructions. Therefore, some scholars advocated that dynamic capability can be further divided into adaptive capacity, absorptive capacity and innovative capacity , and adaptive capacity is the most environment-related capacity and the source of sustainable advantage in uncertain environment (Wang and Ahmed,2007). However, at present the study about the content, context and the outcome of strategic adaptability is still far from enough(Tuominen, Rajala,2004).Therefore, this study mainly focuses on the following three aspects: (1) whether enterprises can realize sustainable advantage through strategic adaptability under uncertain environment; (2) what role does environmental uncertainty play between the afore-mentioned relationship; (3) If strategic adaptability is indeed an important source of sustainable advantage, then how to construct and promote.For the first sub- issue of the study, this paper makes clear firstly the theoretical foundation, connotation of the concept and analysis dimension, and then studies theoretically and empirically on the relationship between strategic adaptability and corporate sustainable advantage. For the second sub- issue, environmental uncertainty is divided into two dimensions of dynamism and heterogeneity in this paper, then I explore it's driving power for strategic adaptability moderating role between strategic adaptability and corporate sustainable advantage, and test it empirically. For the third sub- issue, based on the literature reading and empirical analysis, this paper explored the main ways to promote strategic adaptability from the aspects of top management team's intellectual capital, organic structure, slack resource, innovative culture and, organizational learning.Through the study of the above three sub- issues, this paper obtains these conclusions:(1)Strategic adaptability is the integration of organizational sense-making capability, flexible decision-making capability and strategic implementation capability.Through analysis of related concepts components, with the related research of related areas, strategic adaptability is defined as "the process capability by which enterprises can obtain continued perception about changes in the internal and external environment and make flexible decisions then execute them effectively "in this paper. Based on the "analysis, decision-making, implementation " framework of strategic management process, the and the "sense-seize-reconfiguration" framework by Teece (2007) and the "search - selection - deployment" framework of dynamic capability by Helfat et al. (2007) and existing dimension division about strategic adaptability, the paper puts forward that the strategic adaptability is the integration of organizational sense-making capability, flexible decision-making capability and strategic implementation capability. The above dimensions begin from perception about changes in the internal and external environment to making flexible strategic decisions and forming cooperative and controlling strength to make them implementation. This embodies the complete process about corporate strategic adaptation from recognition to decision-making then to actions. In this paper, the empirical results of factor analysis of strategic adaptability shows that the measuring items can be divided into three factors, i.e., organizational sense-making capability, flexible decision-making capability and strategic implementation capability. This also testifies that the above strategic adaptability's three-dimension division is reasonable in practice.(2) Strategic adaptability is an important source of corporate sustainable advantage in uncertain environment.In uncertain environment, the isolation mechanism of core resources and abilities can create transient advantage. Innovators and first movers can obtain a series of transient advantage. And the integration of serial transient advantage depends on strategic adaptability (Haeckel, 1999). Strategic adaptability is an important source of corporate sustainable advantage. The author has researched the dominant logic of strategic adaptability's creating sustainable advantage and the relationship among each sub-dimension and sustainable advantage. The author has described theoretically the possibility and driving mechanism of strategic adaptability as corporate sustainable advantage's source. According to the empirical results, strategic adaptability and it's sub-dimension all have significant effect on corporate sustainable advantage when enterprise scale and industry types are controlled. Therefore, the theoretical analysis and empirical results show that strategic adaptability is indeed an important source of corporate sustainable advantage.(3)Environmental uncertainty is a driving factor but not moderating variable of strategic adaptabilityAccording to theoretical research, the scholars either argue that environmental uncertainty is a driving factor of strategic adaptability, or think that it is a moderator of the relationship between it and performance. The empirical results of this thesis show that environmental uncertainty has significant positive driving effect on strategic adaptability, and the moderating effect on the relationship between strategic adaptability and corporate sustainable advantage is not significant. Thus, environmental uncertainty is a driving factor of strategic adaptability but not moderator of the relationship between it and sustainable advantage. That's to say, strategic adaptability is affected by environmental uncertainty. The higher the level of environmental uncertainty is, the higher the matching strategic adaptability will be to make sure the sustainable advantage can be obtained. The power of strategic adaptability, or to say, the strengths of the relationship between strategic adaptability and corporate sustainable advantage is not affected by the level of environmental uncertainty.(4)There are five possible ways for strategic adaptability's promotion.After making clear that strategic adaptability is indeed the source of corporate sustainable advantage and this relationship is not affected by the level of environmental uncertainty, this paper has further analyzed related factors that have effects on strategic adaptability's promotion by literature reading and filed investigation. The formation and promotion of strategic adaptability is a long-term, complicating process, and is affected by top management team's intellectual capital, organic structure, slack resource, innovative culture, organizational learning. This paper has also analyzed deeply the promoting mechanisms of organizational learning to strategic adaptability. The empirical results show that most of the hypotheses about the above five factors' effect on strategic adaptability have been tested and verified and have relatively strong explanatory power, and among them, organizational learning's regression coefficient is the highest. Therefore, the promotion of strategic adaptability needs the supports of top management team's intellectual capital, needs the supporting of organic structure, needs the reserving of enough slack resource, needs the nourishing of innovative culture, and needs the guidance of organizational learning.In a word, the theoretical and empirical findings of this paper have important theoretical significance and practical implication, providing a feasible new perspective for the construction of sustainable advantage under environmental uncertainty.