The impact of relative organizational capabilities as firm resources on patterns of strategic and tactical choices of strategic engineering groups

This dissertation investigates how integrative firm resources lead to strategy development in medical groups. The strategy model merges the current firm resources with the process of strategy development into actual strategy content. The study of strategy content is based on the concept of strategic engineers. Strategic engineers concentrate on maximizing efficiency in the organization.; The process of strategy development centers on organizational priorities as intended strategic choices and organizational actions as tactical choices. By combining the process and content of strategy, a new model is developed that suggests that not all strategic engineers are equal.; However, rather than performance as the dependent variable, this model uses strategy as the dependent variable. The firm resource literature suggests that firm resources are key to gaining competitive advantage in an industry. Finding that different types of firm resources lead to different types of engineers may be a precursor to explaining differences in performance, although this study does not address performance of the organization.; This dissertation, consists of several sections. First a model of strategy development is proposed. Second, three sets of integrative firm resources are proposed using the Facing the Uncertain Future Strategically study from 1995. Third, a model with three different kinds of realized strategies and one unrealized strategy is developed using the organizations priorities and actions.; Fourth, the data from the study is analyzed using the priorities and actions of medical groups to compare actual groups of organizations to the model of Strategic Engineering Groups. Finally, the relationship between integrative firm resources and strategic engineering groups is investigated in order to determine if integrative firm resources influence the development of different types of strategic engineering group.