Search results

When many people talk about strategy, they really mean positioning. However important positioning may be, strategists who overlook performance factors are ignoring a key ingredient of company strategy and a source of advantage over competitors.

This paper aims to investigate the internal factors of resources and capabilities of five born globals (BGs) from Estonia. It explores quantitatively the internal factors between a medium BG and four small BGs.

The study used a survey questionnaire in collecting information from the CEOs of BGs. The questionnaire consisted of 105 questions relevant to export sales related to differences in internal factors.

The firms’ size and industrial sector play a role in export sales due to differences in internal factors. Small BGs expect financially based rewards, non-financial rewards, the job satisfaction of sales representatives with the export manager, and with work in general, and the representatives’ job satisfaction is higher in the small BGs than in the medium BG. The sales representatives’ job performance, their work performance, sales presentations, technical knowledge, adaptiveness, teamwork, planning, support, the organisational capabilities for business identification, relationship-building and innovation are all higher in medium BGs than in small BGs. Eleven sub-constructs of the model were shown to be important for small BGs.

The current study is focused on BGs from Estonia, i.e. small BGs and medium BGs. The study contributes to the internal factors of resources and capabilities of BGs as well as to the literature review on BGs. It also provides a logical conceptual model, indicating that the export manager’s job satisfaction is the central construct influenced by antecedent factors and is related directly to the export sales performance of the BG.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the current status of strategic group theory in the light of developments over the last three decades. and then to discuss the continuing value of the concept, both to strategic management research and practising managers.

Critical review of the idea of strategic groups together with a practical strategic mapping illustration.

Strategic group theory still provides a useful approach for management research, which allows a detailed appraisal and comparison of company strategies within an industry.

Strategic group research would undoubtedly benefit from more directly comparable, industry‐specific studies, with a more careful focus on variable selection and the statistical methods used for validation. Future studies should aim to build sets of industry specific variables that describe strategic choice within that industry. The statistical methods used to identify strategic groupings need to be robust to ensure that strategic groups are not solely an artefact of method.

The paper looks specifically at an application of strategic group theory in the UK pharmaceutical industry. The practical benefits of strategic groups as a classification system and of strategic mapping as a strategy development and analysis tool are discussed.

The review of strategic group theory alongside alternative taxonomies and application of the concept to the UK pharmaceutical industry.

The purpose of this paper is to draw upon the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm in an attempt to explore how a firm’s resources (i.e. assets and capabilities) such as social capital (SC) and strategic entrepreneurship (SE) relate to sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) and organizational performance (OP).

Data were collected by questionnaire survey from the supply chain and logistics managers of 242 manufacturing firms in Pakistan. The structural equation modeling approach was used to test the hypotheses.

The results provide support for the proposed hypotheses. The results indicate that SC and SE are positively related to OP. However, the findings show a positive but weak association of SC and SE with SSCM. In a developing country context of Pakistan, organizations are more likely to employ SC and SE for achieving OP. However, relatively less emphasis is placed on linking SC and SE to SSCM. Pakistani organizations need to integrate SSCM into their business strategies. It is concluded that organizations in Pakistan though have some degree of involvement in SSCM but still face some challenges.

The current study attempts to narrow the gap in the available literature in three important aspects. First, it makes the contribution to the literature on SSCM by employing RBV and exploring the relationships of a firm’s resources (i.e. SC) and capabilities (i.e. SE) to SSCM and OP. Second, it employs a relatively more comprehensive measure of SE compared to the limited measures in existing empirical research. Third, the examination of the links of SE and SC to SSCM and OP is of particular importance in the context of a developing country such as Pakistan.

The field of research on resource-based competition is full of nuanced terminology and misunderstandings. This has led to confusion, and thus the authors offer a critical review, which provides a structure and clarity to this subject. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This analysis structures the literature on resources, capabilities, and competences into three distinct schools of thought: the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm, the rational-equilibrium school; the dynamic capability-based view of the firm, the behavioural-evolutionary school; and the competence-based view of the firm, the social constructionist school.

The authors uncover 13 criticisms of the most widely adopted theoretical framework of the RBV of the firm – Valuable-Rare-Imperfectly imitable-Organisation (VRIO).

The misinterpretation and neglect of the classic scholarly work may help to explain why the VRIO framework has been elevated from a view to a theory and why it has received so much attention.

The authors show how the relative ease of measuring resources as compared to (dynamic) capabilities and (core) competencies has helped raise the profile of RBV.

This analysis contributes to management research by illustrating the deviation among the three schools of thought; the authors show how this has contributed to wide terminological confusion and offer a structure to help researchers situate their work within the relevant school of thought.

In this paper, the authors study the long-run determinants of total factor productivity (TFP) in three major European economies over the period 1983–2017, namely Germany, France and Italy.

The authors focus on the capital misallocation effects, scale effects and labor misallocation effects. To this end, the authors study how real interest rate shocks, real exchange rate shocks, real wage shocks and changes in labor regulation affected TFP in major European countries over the last decades. The authors employ a theoretical and an empirical model to investigate the issue. The empirical results are obtained using a VAR model for estimation.

A stripped-down model of labor market in open economy with technology progress allows to identify the relevant variables affecting TFP. On the empirical ground, the authors find a positive relationship between TFP and real interest rate in the long run. Importantly, the authors detect a positive relationship between TFP and real exchange rate. Further, the authors show that the TFP can respond positively to a stricter labor market regulation and to a higher real compensation per employee. The results provide support to the idea that TFP has a positive relation with prices in the long run, while it may be biased along the cycle because of price rigidity.

The present model is stylized and may not capture all of the details of reality. The analysis should be extended to a larger number of countries. Technology progress could be proxied using different variables, as the R&D expenditure or the number of patents. Micro data, for specific sectors and industries, can improve the quality of the empirical investigation.

Mainly the authors find that TFP has a positive relationship with price changes in the long run, while it may be biased along the cycle because of price stickiness. Capital misallocation and labor misallocation can negatively affect TFP. Thus, the observed divergences in European TFP can be traced back to the misallocation effects attributable to the decrease of real interest rate and real wages, together with the raising labor flexibility. Mainly, the authors detect a positive long-run relationship between TFP and real exchange rate. This outcome strengthens the supply-side view of the relationship between productivity and real exchange rate.

The authors believe that the present setup can be helpful to reflect critically on the nodes at the core of the productivity slowdown and asymmetries in the eurozone. The aim is to implement renewed policies in order to favor economic growth, convergence and stability in the euro area.

This research addresses the issue of asymmetries among European economies by focusing on the role played by real prices in the long run. Traditionally, the dynamics of TFP have been attributed only to technological components, human capital and knowledge. This work shows that the dynamics of prices such as the real interest rate, the real exchange rate and the real wage can also influence the technological process by pushing the production system toward choices that are not always optimal for economic growth. An interesting result of this research concerns the positive relationship between real exchange rates and TFP in the long term, evidence of an important supply-side effect on the technological process.

Why do some retail networks operate shop-in-shops along with stand-alone units while others do not? Drawing on a resource-based and intellectual capital (IC) perspective as a broad theoretical lens, the purpose of this paper is to focus on retailer-run shop-in-shops and examine the determinants of their adoption.

To gain a comprehensive understanding of shop-in-shop adoption by retail branded networks, a research design mixing a quantitative study (n = 170) and a qualitative study (n = 19) was adopted to test nine hypotheses regarding these determinants of the adoption of retailer-run shop-in-shops and explore in greater depth the processes whereby they actually occur.

The main findings show that intangible resources are major determinants of the choice to operate shop-in-shops while tangible resources are minor determinants. The more robust results of the analysis lie in the positive effect of own-label merchandise range, premium pricing strategy, positioning based on symbols, retail concept fast renewal and high sector specialisation on the choice to operate a shop-in-shop. The effect of financial constraints on the decision to expand via shop-in-shops is limited.

The authors emphasise the importance of marketing-related and company-related characteristics in differentiating the likelihood of retail networks to expand via shop-in-shops. These results lend support to the relevance of a resource-based and IC perspective in explaining the propensity of retailers to develop via shop-in-shops.

The decision to operate shop-in-shops should depend on the extent to which intangible resources – the most important being retail positioning grounded in symbols, an own-label merchandise range, and a high retail branded network reputation – can be valued and enhanced. Expanding a retail network via shop-in-shops does not appear to be a financially constrained expansion strategy: it must be considered as a relevant first best strategy when an independent and young retail company has intangible resources to value but limited tangible resources.

The study contributes to channel management and retailing research in four ways. First, it precisely delineates the specific characteristics of shop-in-shops. Second, it provides theoretical explanations – based on a resource and IC perspective – of determinants that influence the choice of shop-in-shops. Third, it empirically tests the influence of marketing-related and company-related characteristics when adopting shop-in-shops. Fourth, it provides insights into how adopting shop-in-shops. To the authors’ knowledge, the research is on the first to analyse theoretically and test the determinants for the choice of retailer-run shop-in-shops.

This study investigates the performance distribution of passive funds in the Korean market and compares it with the performance distribution of active funds. The key findings are as follows, first, the performance distribution of passive funds has a thicker tail compared to that of active funds. There are passive funds that achieve outstanding performance, and both the false discovery rate (FDR) analysis and simulation analysis suggest that their outperformance is driven by managerial skill rather than luck. Second, passive fund performance is more persistent compared to active fund performance. Third, investors are less responsive to passive fund performance compared to active fund performance. The fund flow-performance relationship is significantly positive for active funds but not for passive funds. This implies that investors may not recognize the managerial skills of passive funds.

The extant literature on emerging economies states that the development of the institutional context contributes to the creation of hypercompetitive conditions. The purpose of this paper is to test this assertion by using data from both developing and developed countries.

The study used a probit model, Kolmogorov Smirnov tests and propensity score matching to determine the difference in persistent superior economic performance. Panel data from 600 firms in 26 different countries were used for the period from 1995 to 2011.

The empirical results support the proposition that there is a significant difference in superior economic performance and persistent superior economic performance sustainability between firms in developed and developing countries.

This study contributes by fostering other theories related to competitive advantages and giving special emphasis to the comparison between developed and developing countries.

The main purpose of this study is to enunciate the underlying factors that enhance the performance of scaled momentum strategies.

In previous studies, the negative relationship between the lagged volatility and future return of momentum strategy is exploited to manage the risk. But this negative relationship only holds when volatility is higher, further the volatility is shown to be persistent. The implication of these two characteristics is important and this paper highlights that.

The higher performance of the scaled momentum strategies for the US market is linked with the length of the investment horizon. The traditional asset pricing models fail to explain this relationship. However, the authors find that the excess variance loaded on the long side of these strategies is one important explanation of this horizon bound performance of these strategies.

This study highlights that the volatility scaled momentum strategy has higher gains as the investment horizon increases. Therefore, it is an advisable investment strategy for the pension fund industry.

Momentum strategy is unique as it fulfils two criteria of performance enhancement through volatility scaling, such as, the persistent in volatility and its negative relationship with the returns. However, the impact on the performance of the negative relationship between volatility and return that only exist in highest volatility related states is not discussed. The authors have shown that this aspect of volatility and return relationship of the momentum strategy has an important bearing on the performance of the volatility scaled momentum strategies.

Highlights of the Paper

1. This study finds that the Sharpe ratios and the alphas of the volatility scaled strategies increase as the investment horizon increases.

2. This is because the volatility series are highly persistent and the negative predictive relationship between the volatility and future momentum returns only exist when the volatility is higher. The impact of these two characteristics of the volatility series on the performance of the scaled momentum strategies is not discussed in the literature.

3. We find that the scaled strategies invest more/less when the volatility of the momentum strategy is lower/higher. By investing less when volatility is higher, the scaled strategies avoid momentum crashes and lessens the contribution of the variance from the short side in the overall variance of these strategies.

4. It is further shown that the higher performance of the volatility scaled strategies, at each investment related horizon can be explained by the higher variance loaded on the long side of such strategies in comparison to the traditional momentum strategy.

This study finds that the Sharpe ratios and the alphas of the volatility scaled strategies increase as the investment horizon increases.

This is because the volatility series are highly persistent and the negative predictive relationship between the volatility and future momentum returns only exist when the volatility is higher. The impact of these two characteristics of the volatility series on the performance of the scaled momentum strategies is not discussed in the literature.

We find that the scaled strategies invest more/less when the volatility of the momentum strategy is lower/higher. By investing less when volatility is higher, the scaled strategies avoid momentum crashes and lessens the contribution of the variance from the short side in the overall variance of these strategies.

It is further shown that the higher performance of the volatility scaled strategies, at each investment related horizon can be explained by the higher variance loaded on the long side of such strategies in comparison to the traditional momentum strategy.