Manufacturing Class Enterprise Resources And Competitive Strategy Match

One of the most important researching topics in the SM field is to explore the source of firm's competitive advantage and how the firm can choose its competitive strategy to attain such competitive advantage, because of the importance of the competitive advantage for firms to maintain high level performances. The RBV theory has become the dominant paradigm of the competitive advantage theory and the role of distinctive resources (also including core competences and dynamic capabilities) is agreed widely; however as refer to its impact on the competitive strategies is still an open question. Based on the framework of RBV theory, this paper tries to open the "black box" of the causal relationship between resources and competitive advantage, by using empirical study researching methods to figure out the strategic fit of the resources and competitive strategies, and the law of its dynamic evolution.To achieve those research objects, this dissertation followed the researching paradigm to take fit as moderation, which means to focus on the matching relationship between competitive strategies and enterprise resources, and choose business performance as criterion, in order to find the internal mechanism how resources can bring enterprises with high level performance through competitive strategy that matches with them. Firstly, after reviewing related literature and combining those researching results in strategic management studies on the source of performance, this dissertation proposed a basic analyzing framework call RSP which is used to describe the fundamental logical relationship among enterprise resources, competitive strategies and business performance. Secondly, to deeply discuss the effect of special kind of resource to special kind of generic competitive strategy, this dissertation also adopted empirical study method to find the typology of resources Three types of resources are figured out finally, and one conceptual mode is built up to explain business performance by choosing resources as independent variable and competitive strategies as mediation. Thirdly, as a firm-level research, this paper chose top managers of manufacturing business units to make surveys for data collection. The questionnaires were sent and collected in two stages: in the first stage, 330 questionnaires were sent and 113 ones received with 77 valid ones; in the second stage, 573 questionnaires were sent and 206 ones received with 158 valid ones. During the procedure of data processing, some different statistic approaches were adopted, including descriptive methods, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), Multivariate Linear Regression, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA ) and so on. After statistic analysis, this dissertation also chooses the flour business unit of Lianhua Co. in Taiwan and Zhejiang KD Co. as the cases to analyze the law of the dynamic fit and evolvement between enterprise resources and competitive strategies. Lastly, through theoretical exploration and quantitative analysis, some important conclusions are as follows: (1) Except being classified by modality comparability, resources may be scaled and sorted in three categories according to their internal consistency. This work classified the normal 15 kinds of resources into three different types: technical and operating, reputation and network, and organization culture. The first type consists of tangible assets (plant and equipment), and intangible assets, including trade secrets, technological know-how, and intellectual rights The second type consists of reputation of the corporation, internal network relationship and external network relationship. The third type consists of perception of quality, perception of service and perception of innovation.(2) The endowment of enterprise's resources would affect its strategic choice. As regards to the reputation and network resources, they are relative to the forming of other types of resources but have indirect impact on the strategy types. The other two types of resources, including most common types of resources in enterprises have direct and tight relation with the strategy types. In detail, the organizational culture resources have explicit relation with differentiation strategy; however, these leaves more work to be done to figure out the matching style between the production-business resources and generic competitive strategies(3) The different type of strategy chose by the enterprise will have positive or negative impact on the use of its resources. In the logic chain from resources to competitive advantages, competitive strategy plays an important role as a moderator. This comes to the conclude that, there is strategic fit between enterprise resources and its business strategies, and the level of their matching will in general decide that whether the enterprise can achieve competitive advantage or disadvantage, and ultimately affect its business performance.(4) Furthermore, this paper finds that the relationship between resources and competitive strategies is not static, but dynamic and interactive, through the case studies. On one hand, just as mentioned above, the resource endowment will determine which strategy is viable for the firm, and on the other hand, if the competitive strategy was matching with the resources and implemented effectively, then the firm will get good performance. When the firm has high level of profit, it can make more investment to reinforce its resource base or to reduce its resource gap. As environment changes, new opportunity window will open for the firm to conceive of and implement new strategies based on its renewable resource base. If the firm can go on along this way by keeping the fit between its resource endowment and its competitive strategies, then the sustainable competitive advantage is realizable.This dissertation did some tentative work of theoretical innovation as follows: first, partly validated and modified traditional academic viewpoint about the relationship between enterprise resources and competitive strategies, and analyzed the relationship in detail, which improves the know-how about those matching relations and broadens the field of vision to explain competitive advantage from the perspective of strategic fit between resources and strategies; second, this paper analyzed the dynamic fit and evolving path of the fit between resources and strategies, and proposed an theoretical mode called "double-loop pattern" that describing how enterprise can achieve competitive advantage by adjusting strategies to internal resources in different environment conditions, which is more convictive than the original theoretical mode called "one-loop pattern"; third, other than using the traditional typology of resources which is based on the similitude, this paper proposed and validated the measuring model of business unit level resources and finally classified fifteen different kinds of resources into three categories--"manufacturing & operational resources", "resources of social capital", and "resources of organizational culture"--which means resources can be classified by their internal consistency.