| A plethora of research across various fields of management has proposed a variety of reasons to explain the success many firms enjoy. The competitive positioning school (Porter, 1980, 1985) recognizes the value of business-level strategies associated with high performance; however, it focuses on external orientation while ignoring the role of internal attributes, such as resources. By integrating the competitive positioning school and the resource-based view of the firm (Barney, 1991), this study aims to address the following substantive question using a configurational perspective: what configurations of competitive strategies and resources are likely to lead to a high level of firm performance?;Results of the study are as follows: (1) All configurations that are associated with high firm performance involve customer responsiveness strategies. (2) The following configurations enable firms to achieve high performance with respect to the five perceptual measures (i.e., quality, timeliness, flexibility, efficiency, and resource acquisition): customer responsiveness strategies by themselves or when combined with operations & logistics resources; or with innovation strategies coupled with both resources (i.e., management & human resources, and operations & logistics resources). (3) Customer responsiveness strategies, together with management & human resources, contribute to both perceptual and financial measures of firm performance. (4) Hybrid strategies (i.e., the combined strategies of low cost, innovation, and customer responsiveness) are used to achieve high efficiency as well as financial performance with both resources as necessary conditions. (5) Firms may find it useful to emphasize the co-alignment of resources with competitive strategies. Configurations combining strategies with resources appear to be more dominant than those that include either strategies or resources by themselves. (6) A set-theoretic approach appears to have excellent promise for integrating qualitative and quantitative methods to develop and examine a configurational approach to organizations in the future.;Key words: configuration, firm performance, set-theoretic approach.;In this thesis, I propose several configurations of strategies and resources that are expected to lead to high firm performance in terms of perceptual and financial measures. The research was carried out at the business-level using two archival sources of data from 332 top executives of a random sample of motor carriers in the U.S. with a set-theoretic approach (Ragin, 1986, 2000). |
