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Network Structure, Dynamic Capability And Competitive Advantage: An Empirical Study Of Chinese Firms

Posted on:2011-01-03Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:B B DongFull Text:PDF
GTID:1119360305953753Subject:Technical Economics and Management
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With the rapid development of technology, constantly changing of customer preferences, constant introduction of new products and high intensity of competition, the operating environment of the enterprises is unpredictable. The changing environment damages the value of current capacity of the enterprises. In the changing environment nowadays, the enterprises must reconstruct itself to confront the challenges of the changing market and technology in order to seek survival and development. If the enterprise wants to distinguish itself from the rivals, defeat the opponents in the dynamic market, the only way is to innovate constantly and maintain strategic flexibility that is dynamic. Therefore, the basic assumption of this study is that competitive advantage comes from constantly improving, innovation, and re-allocation of resources of the enterprise to develop the functional competency of the enterprise to meet the changing market environment, this competency is called dynamic competency. Thus, the dynamic competency is very important to build the competitive advantage.The competitive advantage of the enterprise is very complicated. Teece, et al (1994) have pointed out that "there is nothing more ambitious than cracking the mystery of the competitive advantage of the enterprises and nations in the social sciences today". In the field of strategic management, scholars studied the competitive advantages from different perspectives. However, due to the limitations of the academic research paradigm, a single theory only can explain the enterprise development from a certain point of view usually, not only is easy to confirm but also easy to falsify, or difficult to docking to the management practices effectively because of the judgment based on the results, although there is a strong demand of the single theory, their applications are limited. The typical models in the traditional competitive advantage research were not built a systematic and logically consistent theoretical model for the sustainable competitive advantage of the enterprises in the dynamic and complex environment. The enterprises, as a complex system of non-linear interaction, its competitive advantage demands that we must adopt the research based on systematic, dynamic, diverse and practical business management. In order to cope with the serious challenges that the dynamic and complex environment brought to the traditional theory of competitive advantage, theoretical circles domestic and abroad have been trying to find a theoretical framework which can effectively guide the competitive advantage to practice in the complex dynamic environment.In order to cope with the serious challenges that the dynamic and complex environment brought to the traditional theory of competitive advantage, theoretical circles domestic and abroad have been trying to find a theoretical framework which can effectively guide the competitive advantage to practice in the complex dynamic environment. Different schools of strategic management have different understanding of the competitive advantage of enterprises: Andrews and others'"Strength - Weaknesses - Opportunities - Threats" (SWOT) model; Porter's industry structure model; Wernerfelt, Barney and Peteraf'resource-based view; Prahalad, Hamel, and Foss and others'ability theory. However, they are almost all based on a stable business competitive environment, focused on and limited to one field, so it is impossible to explain the nature and source of the continuous competitive advantage of the enterprises in a dynamic environment, and we also can not explain the contemporary business practices convincingly. The competitive environment of enterprises is becoming dynamic and complex, this trend requires the perspective of strategic management shift from the assumption of a stable environment into the dynamic and complex environment of corporate strategy management issues. Thus, the proposed of the dynamic capabilities theory which based on environmental changing solve the problem of continuing competitive advantage to a certain extent, and made a certain contribution for the development of enterprises. At the same time, in recent years the emerging network theory have gradually started to examine the impact of the enterprise networking on the competitive advantage and competitiveness, the web-based competitive advantage research will be the focus of future research. Moreover, scholars pay a lot of attention on the research of the network to the enterprise capabilities. This paper will study the relationship between the dynamic capability and competitive advantage from the view of network structure based on this reason to enrich the corporate strategic management theories. The contents and conclusions of this study are:(1)Starting from the network structure to study the mechanisms that the three dimensions of the network structure, namely network strength, network density and network centrality, have on the dynamic capabilities. The results showed that: network structure significantly affected the dynamic capabilities of the enterprise. The specific implications are: network strength positively affects the environmental adaptability, organizational change capabilities, organizational flexibility and learning ability respectively. Network density positively affects the environmental adaptability, organizational change capabilities, organizational flexibility and learning ability respectively. Network centrality positively affects the environmental adaptability, organizational change capabilities, organizational flexibility and strategic isolation respectively. But the network strength and network density have negative affects on the strategic isolation.(2) Using multiple regressions to explore the relationship between dynamic capabilities and competitive advantage, the results showed that: the five dimensions of the dynamic capabilities are all have positive correlation with the competitive advantage of the enterprises. The specific relations are: the environmental adaptability, organizational change capabilities, organizational flexibility, learning ability and strategic isolation are all have positive relationship with the competitive advantage of the enterprises.(3) Using the mediating regression method to explore the imediating role of the dynamic capability. The results showed that: dynamic capabilities play different roles in different relationship between network structures and competitive advantage. The specific results include: dynamic capabilities have the intermediary role in the network strength - competitive advantage and the network density- competitive advantage, that is, network strength and network density impacts the competitive advantage through dynamic capabilities, they have no direct impact on the competitive advantage. The network-centric nature not only has a direct impact on the competitive advantage, but also has indirect influence on the competitive advantage through dynamic capabilities.The contribution of this article can be summarized as the following points:1. Built an integrated model of enhancing competitive advantage of the enterprise from the network perspective, and did the empirical study with national survey data. In the previous studies, the scholars focused on the source of the competitive advantage in the enterprises, they also researched what factors contributed to the emergence of competitive advantage, such as enterprise resources, etc. There are few articles studied the development of enterprises dedicated from external network perspectives and internal capacity perspective. Only a few articles studied the development of the enterprise ability and the sustainability of the competitive advantage respectively, but did not put the two under a large framework to study. In this paper, we put the external network structure as the main line to study the enhancing mechanism of internal dynamics ability of the enterprise. We also put the network structure, dynamic capabilities and competitive advantages into a systematic framework. This study enriched and developed the study of competitive advantage. And it is a new attempt to conduct the empirical research with the use of our survey data.2. This article describes the various elements (dimensions) of the dynamic ability broadly and divides it into five dimensions, namely, environmental adaptability, organizational change ability, organizational flexibility, learning ability and strategic isolation. A number of previous scholars divided the dynamic capabilities into several dimensions only based on the meaning of the dynamic capabilities, although there are some reasons and basis, this dividing approach ignores the important role of other ability to the enterprise development, it is unilateral and need to be further discussion. This part is an expanding and complement of the current theoretical research of the dynamic capabilities and has certain significance to the construction of the enterprise ability system.3. We change the research status of confusion the competitive advantage with business performance. Previous scholars all use the performance indicators to measure and analyze the measurement indicators about competitive advantage. They confused the difference between the performance and the competitive advantage; competitive advantage is the antecedent variables of the performance. In this paper, we measured the competitive advantage from the aspect of low-cost, services, processes, market response and market share, which has great legitimacy. This is a new attempt in theory and practice.4. We explored the intermediary role of the dynamic capabilities between network structure and competitive advantage for the first time. Previous studies either researched the relationship between networks structure and competitive advantage, or researched the relationship between a particular dimension of dynamic capabilities and competitive advantage, there are few studies have explored the role of dynamic capabilities between competitive advantage and network structure. This is the first time to study the dynamic capabilities from the perspective of intermediary.5. This paper put forward the new perspective of improving dynamic capability on the view of network, which is the exogenism. The previous views believed that the dynamic capability resulted from the inner resources. The paper analyses the networking feature and argues that the network can improve the dynamic capability, which is innovative id theory.
Keywords/Search Tags:Network structure, Dynamic capability, Competitive advantage
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