Configurations of Resources, Strategy, Structure and Environment in Young High-technology Firms: Evidence from Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Abstract

Traditional configuration approach uses some combinations of four domains, namely, environment, strategy, structure and leadership, for identifying organizational configurations. Responding to call for improving extant theoretical specification, this article draws on resource-based view to argue for the inclusion of resource as a domain. Crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis is used to analyze the primary data collected through questionnaire from 60 Indian, young high-technology firms. Configurations of high-performing young firms from high-technology sector in India exhibit reliance on high entrepreneurial orientation (EO) to balance the issue of unavailability of managers with high-growth experience. Firms either choose new product development strategy or inorganic corporate development strategy depending mainly upon environmental contexts. In none of the configurations achieving high performance, ‘high number of experienced managers’ and high EO are simultaneously absent; in the majority of the configurations, the condition ‘high number of experienced managers’ is absent, and the absence of high EO coincides with the absence of ‘corporate development strategy’ or with ‘small size’. These findings on configurations, their internal causal mechanisms and implications are discussed.