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This study aims to assess how employee innovativeness, employee self-efficacy and customer-centricity intervene in the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational competitiveness of insurance firms.

This study was a survey, with data collected using a structured questionnaire. The population was the insurance firms in Ghana, and the target respondents were employees. The sample comprises 218 employees drawn from 19 insurers. Data was analyzed using structural equation modeling.

This study concludes that transformational leadership had a direct effect on organizational competitiveness. Employee innovativeness partially mediated the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational competitiveness. Employee self-efficacy moderated the effect of transformational leadership on employee innovativeness. Finally, customer-centricity moderated the effect of employee innovativeness on the organizational competitiveness of insurance firms.

Future studies should pay particular attention to the individual dimensions of transformational leadership (individualized consideration, intellectual stimulation, inspirational motivation and idealized influence), in combination with the other constructs studied.

Insurance is a service industry, which sells mostly unsolicited products. Customer-centricity is therefore very crucial in achieving organizational competitiveness. Attention should also be paid to transformational leadership and employee self-efficacy, as they enhanced employee innovativeness needed for competitive advantage.

This study contributed to the understanding of the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational competitiveness, by identifying employee innovativeness, employee self-efficacy and customer centricity, as intervening variables.

The burgeoning population has an adverse impact on the employability prospects in the emerging economies and has triggered entrepreneurial activities to steer this predicament. The purpose of this study is to explicate the major entrepreneurial competencies that drive firm competitiveness.

Three industrial estates were selected from the two major industrial districts of eastern Uttar Pradesh, India. The study used a cross-sectional design and responses from micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) entrepreneurs were collected by employing a structured questionnaire. Structural equation modeling was applied to empirically validate the proposed hypotheses in the study.

The study discerns the enablers of firm competitiveness and pursuit of excellence. The results reveal that the need for achievement and locus of control competencies strikingly augment firm competitiveness while risk-taking capability and innovativeness competencies aggrandize pursuit of excellence competency. The study further adduces that pursuit of excellence partially mediates between the liaison of risk-taking capability and innovativeness on the one end and firm competitiveness on the other.

The study demonstrates the compelling determinants of firm competitiveness and pursuit of excellence that might embolden training institutes and banks to emphasize the identified competencies for enhancing firm competitiveness and advancing loans.

There is a paucity of literature on “pursuit of excellence” and “firm competitiveness” regarding the MSME sector in India. Therefore, the study contributes to the literature by synthesizing these constructs in an epigrammatic conceptual model. The study is distinctive because it is one of the rare studies to explore the mediating effects of the pursuit of excellence entrepreneurial competency.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is viewed as a differentiating strategy that wins over stakeholders’ confidence. Due to the potential strategic and positive effects on businesses, the study of CSR and its relationship to competitiveness has gained relevance. While studies have examined the impact of CSR activities on firm competitiveness, the findings so far remain contradictory. Further research on the underlying processes/mechanisms that explain how CSR contributes to competitiveness remains scarce. Accordingly, this study aims to look into the link between CSR and competitiveness with a focus on Asian business and management studies.

By using a bibliometric approach, this paper aims to provide a review of the state-of-the-art research on the linkage between CSR and competitiveness in Asian context. The sample for this research included all 538 studies from the period of 2001–2023 in the Scopus database. A bibliometric study included both co-occurrence and co-citation analysis.

The study’s findings made significant contributions by identifying seven distinct clusters of co-occurrences. Using co-citation, three journals-based co-citation clusters and another three authors-based co-citation clusters are identified. The findings show how processes/mechanisms such as – accountability, multi-stakeholder dialogue/engagement, resource generation, emphasizing sustainable development goals and emerging markets, redefining strategy, cultivating value/vision and CSR leadership – are increasing in importance.

Overall, the authors argue that CSR-led competitiveness is indeed one of the key drivers for improved sustainability performance of a firm.

Based on findings, a conceptual framework has been proposed highlighting different processes and mechanisms that influence the CSR-led competitiveness – outcomes relationship.

Using analytics for firms' competitiveness is a vital component of a company's strategic planning and management process. In recent years, organizations have started to capitalize on the significant use of big data for analyses to gain valuable insights to improve decision-making processes. In this regard, leveraging and unleashing the potential of big data has become a significant success factor for steering firms' competitiveness, and the related literature is increasing at a very high pace. Thus, the authors propose a bibliometric study to understand the most important insights from these studies and enrich existing conceptual models.

In this study, the authors use a bibliometric review on articles related to the use of big data for firms' competitiveness. The authors examine the contributions of research constituents (authors, institutions, countries and journals) and their structural and thematic relationships (collaborations, co-citations networks, co-word networks, thematic trends and thematic map). The most important insights are used to enrich a conceptual model.

Based on the performance analysis results, the authors found that China is by far the most productive country in this research field. However, in terms of influence (by the number of citations per article), the most influential countries are the UK, Australia and the USA, respectively. Based on the science mapping analysis results, the most important findings are projected in the common phases of competitive intelligence processes and include planning and directions concepts, data collection concepts, data analysis concepts, dissemination concepts and feedback concepts. This projection is supplemented by cross-cutting themes such as digital transformation, cloud computing, privacy, data science and competition law. Three main future research directions are identified: the broadening of the scope of application fields, the specific case of managing or anticipating the consequences of pandemics or high disruptive events such as COVID-19 and the improvement of connection between firms' competitiveness and innovation practices in a big data context.

The findings of this study show that the most important research axis in the existing literature on big data and firms' competitiveness are mostly related to common phases of competitive intelligence processes. However, concepts in these phases are strongly related to the most important dimensions intrinsic to big data. The use of a single database (Scopus) or the selected keywords can lead to bias in this study. Therefore, to address these limitations, future studies could combine different databases (i.e. Web of Science and Scopus) or different sets of keywords.

This study can provide to practitioners the most important concepts and future directions to deal with for using big data analytics to improve their competitiveness.

This study can help researchers or practitioners to identify potential research collaborators or identify suitable sources of publications in the context of big data for firms' competitiveness.

The authors propose a conceptual model related to big data and firms' competitiveness from the outputs of a bibliometric study.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between blockchain technology adoption and firm competitiveness through Halal supply chain performance as a mediating variable.

This paper has used the explanatory approach and multivariate data analysis using partial least squares with structural equation modelling. The data were collected from 178 Indonesian manufacturing firms producing Halal-certified foods and beverages.

The findings reveal that adopting blockchain technology positively and significantly affects Halal supply chain performance and firm competitiveness. The total indirect effect shows that the availability of blockchain technology indirectly affects the firm’s competitiveness through Halal supply chain performance.

This study has provided a novel theoretical framework showing that adopting blockchain technology can improve the Halal supply chain performance and the firm’s competitiveness. The transparency and integrity features of blockchain technology have strengthened the consumers’ confidence in the reliability of the Halal-certified food and beverage products.

The purpose of this study is to examine the alignment between the risk hedging strategy and supplier collaboration and its effect on manufacturing competitiveness.

Building on the resource-based view (RBV) and contingency theory (CT), this study is guided by a positivist philosophy and employs a survey strategy to investigate both the direct relationship between the risk hedging strategy and manufacturing competitiveness and the moderating role of supplier collaboration using data collected from 397 respondents of manufacturing firms. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) technique is used to analyze collected data and to present the research findings.

Consistent with the RBV and CT, study findings indicate that a significant positive relationship exists between the risk hedging strategy and manufacturing competitiveness and that this relationship becomes stronger when supplier collaboration is interactively aligned. Study findings provide important insights on the role of the risk hedging strategy in promoting manufacturing competitiveness. Furthermore, supplier collaboration as a moderator accounts for a significant proportion of the relationship between the risk hedging strategy and manufacturing competitiveness.

Internal resources provide an explanation of the competitive differences among firms employing the risk hedging strategy. However, the environment presents opportunities for firms to acquire additional resources to fulfil the unique collaborative requirements of the risk hedging strategy. This study has used the moderation perspective to explain the interaction between the risk hedging strategy and supplier collaboration and its effect on manufacturing competitiveness. Future studies could incorporate other alignment concepts such as mediation and systems approach and compare the results to improve the theory.

This study can be considered as its kind in the supply chain management literature and both practitioners and researchers can benefit from the experience of resource-based and contingency analysis research and the results of aligning the risk hedging strategy with supplier collaboration for higher levels of manufacturing competitiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to identify different types of resource and capability configurations among Hungarian family and nonfamily firms and explore which compositions can be considered competitive. In a rivalrous, dynamic world, understanding which sets of resources and capabilities lead to a higher level of competitiveness is vital.

This paper is based on a quantitative competitiveness survey carried out between November 2018 and July 2019 in Hungary. The authors used the Firm Competitiveness Index (FCI) to measure competitiveness and the resource-based view (RBV) approach to understand which configurations of resources and capabilities are responsible for a higher level of competitiveness based on 32 variables. An exploratory factor and cluster analysis were conducted to analyze the ownership's effect on firm competitiveness. The final sample size contained 111 companies, of which 53 were identified as family and 58 as nonfamily firms.

Factor analysis reveals five factors determining resources and capabilities: “operational,” “leadership,” “knowledge management,” “transformation” and “networking.” Based on these factors, the cluster analysis identified five groups in terms of types of family and nonfamily firms: “Lagging capabilities,” “Knowledge-based leadership,” “Innovativeness and transformation-oriented management,” “Relationship-oriented management” and “Business operation-oriented management.” Results show that nonfamily businesses focus on operational and leadership capabilities, reaching a higher FCI than family businesses, which are likely to invest more in their networking, transformation and knowledge management capabilities.

By defining the different configurations family and nonfamily firms rely on to reach competitiveness, the paper applies an essential element to the Hungarian and Middle Eastern European contexts of family business research. The findings contribute to developing family business literature and point out specific resources and capabilities family firms should focus on to shift toward reaching a higher level of professionalization and competitiveness. The characterization of different types of competitiveness comparing family and nonfamily firms enables the firms to assess customized implications.

Defining and measuring competitiveness has been a major focus in the business and competition literature over the past decades. The paper aims to use data-driven principal component analysis (PCA) to measure firm competitiveness.

A “3Ps” (performance, potential, and process) firm competitiveness indicator system is structured for indicator selection. Data-driven PCA is proposed to measure competitiveness by reducing the dimensionality of indicators and assigning weights according to the endogenous structure of a dataset. To illustrate and validate the method, a case study applying to Chinese international construction companies (CICCs) was conducted.

In the case study, 4 principal components were derived from 11 indicators through PCA. The principal components were labeled as “performance” and “capability” under the two respective super-components of “profitability” and “solvency” of a company. Weights of 11 indicators were then generated and competitiveness of CICCs was finally calculated by composite indexes.

This study offers a systematic indicator framework for firm competitiveness. The study also provides an alternative approach to better solve the problem of firm competitiveness measurement that has long plagued researchers.

The data-driven PCA approach alleviates the difficulties of dimensionality and subjectivity in measuring firm competitiveness and offers an alternative choice for companies and researchers to evaluate business success in future studies.

The study aims to test the framework that proposes the role of resources (intellectual capital) in mobilizing entrepreneurial orientation that influences the competitiveness improvement of micro-small-medium enterprises (MSMEs) under the lens of resource orchestration theory.

In this study, 347 respondents from the MSMEs participated through a structured questionnaire. For the data analysis purpose, the structural equation modeling technique was employed using SmartPLS software.

The results suggest human, structural, and relational capital are significant antecedents of entrepreneurial orientation, which leads to competitiveness improvement. The findings also indicate the mediation role of entrepreneurial orientation between intellectual capital and competitiveness improvement.

The current study presumably will supplement the promising research effort to progress the research orchestration theory and also could be a strategic guideline for the managers/owners of the MSMEs.

This study is possibly a novel attempt to divulge the association between intellectual capital (tripartite model) and competitiveness improvement of firms under the lens of resource orchestration theory.

Customer orientation (CO) means meeting customers’ needs better than competitors. Competitor orientation means using and acting upon the knowledge of competitors. Thus, the main aim of this study is to analyze the effects of environmental competitiveness on export performance by examining the moderating roles of these variables.

Based on data from 5,000 firms from a survey run in 2021 in Turkey facilitated by the Chamber of Commerce, the authors tested their hypotheses using partial least squares structural equation modeling and correlation analysis.

The results show that competitor orientation positively affects the relationship between a competitive environment and export performance. However, the authors do not find evidence of a significant effect on CO.

Service sector managers should sacrifice customers to gain export market share in favor of superiority with competitors.

Prior research has yet to emphasize the importance of competition intensity in export performance for service-logistics firms. However, the environmental competitiveness–performance relationship is better explained with the help of these test results and the two additional moderators suggested in this work. Moreover, the export performance indicators were gathered from an independent source.