Abstract
This research aims to examine the competitiveness and the strategic behavior of the Lebanese SMEs, through their possession and exploitation of strategic resource-capability combination attributes. A sample of 285 Lebanese SMEs were obtained through the use of a survey questionnaire and the non-probability sampling to collect primary and quantitative data. The results show that for Lebanese SMEs, not all resources-capabilities are of equal importance when creating competitive advantage. They indicate that only organizational resource-capability combinations are considered as strategic assets and related to differentiation advantage, financial resource-capability combinations are only considered as strategic assets and related to cost advantage, and that cost and differentiation advantage are both related to performance.There were some problems concerning the data collection due to the fact that the Lebanese SMEs owners are not familiar with the research. In fact, this study may have positive implications on the Lebanese SMEs managers’ decisions, where this study can be considered as a guideline that will help them revise their strategic choices, behaviors, capabilities and resources, vis-à-vis of competition and to readjust their strategy if it does not work well. Indeed, the value of this research is that it is the first to empirically study the Resource-Based View in Lebanon from the Lebanese SMEs context, which is considered as suitable context, given its crucial contribution to the whole economy. It is one of the rare studies that reflects SMEs challenges and problems that inhibit them from improving their performance. Keywords: Value, Rareness, Competitive advantage, Performance, Lebanese SMEs DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/12-18-14 Publication date: June 30th 2020
Highlights
Firms in general, and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in particular, are facing many challenges that inhibit them from improving their competitiveness and outperforming their competitors in the current marketplace
Www.iiste.org and since this study only focuses on studying competitive advantage creation from the resource based view (RBV) lens (Barney,1991), competitive advantage is considered as the ability to create more economic value through attributes and resources to perform at a higher position of advantage than others in the same industry or market
For the Lebanese SMEs that compete through cost advantage, it becomes clear that the financial resource-capability combinations are considered as a strategic asset and an important factor and antecedent to achieving cost advantage, since they are valuable and rare
Summary
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in particular, are facing many challenges that inhibit them from improving their competitiveness and outperforming their competitors in the current marketplace. SMEs are facing a lack of resources, weak strategic behavior and myopic strategic focus (Rubio and Aragón, 2009; Woschke, Haase and Kratzer, 2017) Their thinking and behavior toward competition is about being number one or being the best in the marketplace (Porter, 2015), making the focus of the firms on beating rivals, rather than creating value for costumers (Magretta, 2011), competing in the same basis, offering, common products for customers, where the value is destroyed, resulting in achieving similar results. This win-win relationship makes the CA and the sources behind it, the cornerstone of strategic management research
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