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Decisions about the design of the organization and the competitive strategy of a firm are very important in order to gain competitive advantage and to improve firm performance. The relationship between organizational structure, competitive strategy, and firm performance has usually been analyzed using the contingency approach. The objective of this paper is to extend the relevant empirical literature of the strategy‐structure‐performance paradigm by comparing the resource‐based view (RBV) with contingency theory. To that end, the paper seeks to examine how organizational structure affects firm performance, taking into account the relationship with competitive strategy.

A sample of large Spanish firms was studied using the partial least squares (PLS) technique.

The results support both the RBV and the contingency approach, but the RBV is more strongly supported. The findings show that organizational structure does not exert a direct influence on performance, but has an indirect influence through competitive strategy.

The findings are limited to large firms. Therefore, they cannot be generalized to smaller companies. In addition, the use of opinion scales gives the study a subjective character. However, in this respect, most of the characteristics of organizational structure and competitive strategy are difficult to measure with objective data.

Researchers have studied the relationship between strategy and structure for a long time based on contingency theory. This study provides an alternative formulation for organizational design theory, based on the RBV, which makes it possible to reframe the relationships between strategy and structure by analyzing the organizational structure as a valuable resource and a source of competitive advantage.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of competitive strategies and organizational structure on hotel performance and to explore whether organizational structure has a moderating effect on the relationship between competitive strategies and hotel performance.

This study employed a causal and descriptive research design to determine the cause‐and‐effect relationships among competitive strategies, organizational structure, and hotel performance based on previous studies. A 28‐question self‐administered questionnaire comprising three sections was employed. The target population for this study was US hotel owners and general and executive managers whose e‐mail addresses were listed on a publicly available database. A census survey was carried out and e‐mails were sent to all of the hoteliers listed in the database.

The results show a competitive human resources (HR) strategy to have a direct impact on a hotel's behavioral performance, and a competitive IT strategy to have a direct impact on a hotel's financial performance. Organizational structure is found to have a moderating effect on the relationship between both of these strategies and behavioral performance, a result similar to those reported by Jogaratnam and Tse and by Tarigan. However, the results of the current study show that organizational structure has no influence on the relationship between a brand image strategy and a hotel's behavioral performance, nor does it have any moderating effect on the relationship between a hotel's financial performance and its competitive brand image, HR or IT strategy.

When hoteliers face an uncertain environment, they need to select which form of organizational structure to adopt with care. Hotels that adopt an organic structure allow greater flexibility in the workplace, meaning that they may lose control of their employees and productivity. A mechanistic organizational structure, in contrast, gives hoteliers the power to monitor employee behavior and productivity, which may help them to achieve goals and boost financial performance.

The paper provides further evidence of how competitive HR and IT strategies help to explain hotel performance, whereas a brand image strategy and organizational structure are not good explanatory factors in this regard. Hotels with a mechanistic such structure enjoy a greater relationship between a competitive HR strategy and behavioral performance than their organically structured counterparts. With regard to IT strategic implementation, in contrast, hotels with an organic structure enjoy superior behavioral performance to those with a mechanistic structure.

The objective of this paper is to propose a consumer-behavior-based intelligence (CBBI) model to identify market structure so as to monitor product competition. Competitive intelligence extracted from Chinese e-business clickstream data is exploited to examine the relevance of consumers' heterogeneous behavioral feedback, namely, click, tag-into-favorite, time-of-browsing, add-into-cart, and remove-from-cart, to visualize the competitive product market structure and to predict product-level sales.

Our proposed CBBI model consists of visualization and prediction, which explore e-business clickstream data. We conduct the visualization and segmentation of market structure in the form of a perceptual map by employing K-means clustering algorithm and multidimensional scaling technique. Concurrently, we developed an updated Bayesian linear regression (BLR) to predict product-level sales by considering consumers' heterogeneous feedback. Our updated BLR specifically integrated the estimated knowledge of the previous periods to verify whether product sales are period-dependent due to the consumer memory effect in e-commerce, improving the conventional BLR of diffuse prior distribution setup in terms of mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean squared error (RMSE).

Considering the performance of consumers' heterogeneous actions, the present research visualized three different segments of the competitive market structure in a perceptual map, and its horizontal axis is shown as a signal of the ascending trend of product sales. The previous five-day period was ascertained to be the best size of a time window for the consumer memory effect on product sales prediction. This hypothesis is supported by the concept that product sales are period-dependent. The results of the proposed updated BLR indicate that consumer tag-into-favorite, add-into-cart, and remove-from-cart feedback have positive impacts on product-level sales while click and time-of-browsing have the opposite effect.

While the identified competitive product market structure elaborates consumer heterogeneous feedback toward alternative product choices, this paper contributes by extending those homogeneous consumer preferences-related marketing studies. The perceptual map's configuration in respect to period-dependent product sales facilitates the effective inclusion of consumer behavior application in product sales prediction research in e-commerce. This paper helps sellers and retailers better comprehend the impacts of heterogeneous feedback and the consumer memory effect on the degree of competition in the form of product sales. The research results also offer a managerial implication about shaping the competitive edge by conducting different product management strategies in e-commerce platforms.

Presents an integrated framework that would help manufacturing managers to select IT applications (manufacturing management systems) that are best suited to a given process structure and the intended competitive priorities of a firm. The proposed framework is based on the premiss that the process of matching IT applications to competitive priorities involves identification of key manufacturing tasks underlying different priorities and the corresponding process structures. The theoretic‐deductive approach is used to link the three vital elements ‐ competitive priorities, process structures and IT applications ‐ in the following application areas: product design, demand management, capacity planning, inventory management, shopfloor systems, quality management and distribution.

In this chapter, the author outlines the link between organization design and competitive strategy, focusing on rivalry. A firm’s organization design choices can affect its competitive advantage as well as the strategic decisions of its rivals. Therefore, organization design can influence the nature and intensity of competitive interactions between firms. To illustrate this effect, the author focuses on the literature on divisionalization and offers a set of propositions as examples. Taken together, the author makes three main observations: (1) a firm’s competitive position and objectives are reflected in its organizational choices; (2) heterogeneity in competitive position and objectives lead to heterogeneity in organization design choices across firms; and (3) organization design and competitive strategy are interdependent processes. The author concludes by discussing the implications for strategy and management research and pointing out some opportunities for future research.

Decisions about strategies to be implemented and organization design are important in having competitive advantage for companies. Although this statement widely takes place in management literature, very little research has been done on this subject in Turkey. The aim of this study is to examine the mediating role of competitive strategies in the impact of organizational flexibility on competitive advantage in order to extend about empirical literature of the structure-strategy-competitive advantage paradigm based on the resource-based view (RBV). In this context, the data were collected from the top 500 industrial enterprises in Turkey. The data were tested via structural equation model. The findings of our research show that the direct effect of organizational flexibility on competitive superiority was marginally significant and when three different competitive strategies were included between these two variables in the model, the marginally significant effect of organizational flexibility on the competitive advantage disappeared. In other words, the full mediating role of applied competition strategies in the effect of organizational flexibility on competitive advantage has been identified. Our findings are similar to the findings of other studies that consider organizational structure as a valuable resource and examine the relationship between the structure and the strategy according to the RBV.

This paper aims to examine the evolution of a competitive market structure over time through the lens of competitive group membership dynamics.

A new hidden Markov modeling approach is devised that accounts for the three sources of competitive heterogeneity involving managerial strategy, corporate performance and the impact of strategy on performance. In addition, some observed “entry” and “exit” states are considered to model firms’ entry into and exit from the market. The proposed model is illustrated with an investigation of the US banking industry based on a data set created from the COMPUSTAT database. This paper estimated the model within the Bayesian framework and devised a reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo estimation procedure to determine the number of latent competitive groups and uncover the characteristics of each group.

This paper shows that the US banking industry, contrary to the prior findings of having a relatively stable structure, has, in fact, gone through dramatic changes in the past number of decades.

Contrary to prior work that has primarily focused on managerial strategy to study market evolutions, the competitive groups perspective accounts for all three sources of intra-industry competitive heterogeneity. In addition, unlike prior research, the analysis is not limited to firms remaining in the panel of study for the entire observation period. Such limitation results in missing the various changes that occur in the competitive market structure because of the new entrants or the struggling firms that do not survive in the market.

This study investigates the influence of six interrelated contextual factors, namely organisational structure, quality of information technology, business strategy in terms of deliberate strategy-formulation, market orientation, market competition and perceived environmental uncertainty (PEU), on the usage intensity of innovative management accounting techniques commonly referred to as strategic management accounting (SMA); the impact of SMA usage on competitive advantage; and the moderating influence of the contextual factors on the relationship between SMA usage and competitive advantage.

Survey data were obtained through a structured questionnaire from publicly listed manufacturing companies on the main board of the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE). Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and moderated regression were used to analyse data. Both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were used to examine the validity and reliability of variables as first and second order of analysis. Structural equation modelling (SEM) (maximum likelihood estimation method) was applied to assess the robustness of result.

Market orientation and deliberate strategy-formulation emerged as significant determinants of SMA usage intensity. Although there is a significant relationship between SMA usage and competitive advantage, the strength of the relationship is moderate. Organisational structure, deliberate strategy-formulation and PEU significantly moderate the relationship between SMA usage and competitive advantage.

The emergence of deliberate strategy-formulation, as both a significant predictor of SMA usage intensity and as the strongest moderator of the relationship between SMA usage and competitive advantage, establish that it is organisations that take a proactive approach to strategy issues that may derive the most benefit from SMA utilisation.

The result from this study brings to fore the need to involve management accountants in strategy-formulation and implementation in order to leverage their competence in deploying SMA techniques to enhance organisational competitiveness.

The current study is the first, to the researcher's knowledge, to specifically examine interrelated contextual factors distinctively affecting SMA usage and organisational competitiveness in a developing country. Whilst these six factors have been stressed as important determinants of the adoption of innovative management accounting techniques, the study provides empirical evidence on the extent to which they exert on SMA. The study presents empirical evidence on the relevance of market orientation—a construct which has surprisingly received little research attention in management accounting literature—as a variable which could affect the adoption of management accounting innovation.

Drawing on a network perspective on enterprise agility, the purpose of this paper is to explore whether firms with superior network structure not only may be better able to generate direct effect on firm performance, but whether a superior network structure may also help firms to create better firm agility and thus enhance their performance.

The study employed a survey method and data were collected from 250 companies in Taiwan's glass industry. Using structural equation modeling (SEM) technology, it specified the measurement properties of survey instrument such as reliabilities and validities and then identified causal relation among latent constructs to examine causal effects of hypotheses testing.

The results show that a firm's agility capability and its network structure are a critical competitive strategy source of firm performance. Moreover, network structure also partially mediates the impact of enterprise agility on firm performance.

Because the data were collected from a single industry and firm performance is evaluated by subjective managerial assessments, further research may be necessary by using the data involving multiple industries with objective performance indices for more meaningful and generalized results.

The findings confirm the importance of enterprise agility for contemporary firms in today's dynamic business environment. By reinforcing enterprise agility, firms could react better to unpredictable changes. In addition, firms also are suggested to put more effort into developing and maintaining their network structures, both as repositories of external resources and as boosters of enterprise agility.

The paper provides evidence regarding the impact of enterprise agility and network structure on firm performance.

The structure‐conduct‐performance (SCP) paradigm was devised over half a century ago in an effort to contextualise and explain industry dynamics. However, the framework suffers from a number of shortcomings and, consequently, it has been criticised over the years. Yet, despite its weaknesses, it has survived its criticisms and is still used in industrial organisations (IOs) for the purposes of competitive analysis. In time, the framework has also been adopted by strategic management, and in the area of strategic groups it holds a prominent position in the literature. This study aims to address this issue.

The study is cross‐sectional and is based on primary research. It involves face‐to‐face semi‐structured interviews and the sample size is near to the sampling frame of the research.

The paper develops a cognitive dimension and, based on the findings of primary research, extends the framework in a manner that provides a better insight into competitive dynamics.

This article views the SCP paradigm from a strategic perspective and discusses its limitations.