战略组态与竞争优势、组织韧性:基于中国制造企业研究

Strategy configurations and competitive advantage,organizational resilience:Research based on Chinese manufacturing firms

本文从组态视角探讨哪些战略组态有助于制造企业获得竞争优势,在这些战略组态中又有哪些有利于制造企业提升组织韧性。研究基于沪深两市A股545家中国制造业上市公司2016—2019年间2180个平衡面板数据,运用必要条件分析(NCA)、时间序列定性比较分析(TSQCA)和典型案例提取技术,对战略导向(多元化战略、差异化战略、成本领先战略)、环境特征(环境动态性、环境丰富性)和组织资源(成本黏性、组织规模、所有权)这3个构面8个条件进行分析,以探讨战略组态与竞争优势、组织韧性之间的关系。研究发现:(1)8个条件对高竞争优势都不存在瓶颈影响,即高竞争优势的获取并不要求任何条件达到特定水平;(2)中国制造企业中存在10种高竞争优势的战略组态,可归并为资源依托式、多元扩张式、成本领先式、成本多元式、差异多元式这5大模式;(3)战略组态会显著影响组织韧性,其中,采取多元扩张式、成本领先式的企业相对缺乏韧性,而采取差异多元式的企业更具组织韧性。研究表明:战略组态差异会导致企业竞争优势差异;即便是拥有竞争优势的企业也未必拥有组织韧性;只有特定的战略组态才能让企业兼具竞争优势和组织韧性。研究依托一个整合式动态定性比较分析方案,基于组态视角解释了竞争优势构建机制,发现公司战略与业务战略的多种组合方式,找到兼具竞争优势和组织韧性的战略组态。

Based on the holistic and systemic view,the Configurational School of strategy management believes that competitive advantage comes from a good match of multiple conditions in“strategy-environment-organization”,that strategy configuration is the“essence of strategy”,and that different strategy configurations lead to different competitive advantages.Chinese manufacturing firms are not only concerned with competitive advantage,but also with organizational resilience.Organizational resilience is the potential ability of an organization to anticipate,avoid,and respond to environmental shocks.Moreover,its most distinctive characteristic is“resilience in the face of crisis”,which means that the organization can maintain a competitive advantage under crisis shocks,showing robustness and reliability.In recent years,major developed countries have begun to rethink their development model of transforming the economy from substantial to fictitious,hoping to refocus on the real economy and reinvigorate manufacturing through“re-industrialization”and thus get rid of the dependence on Chinese manufacturing.Some studies forecast that the US-China trade war will result in a lose-lose outcome,with Chinese manufacturing firms suffering more losses than the US in relative terms.An ideal state worth pursuing for Chinese manufacturing firms is to own both competitive advantage and organizational resilience.This study uses necessary condition analysis(NCA),time-series qualitative comparative analysis(TSQCA),and typical case extraction techniques to analyze strategy orientation(diversification strategy,differentiation strategy,and cost-leading strategy),environmental characteristics(environmental dynamism and environmental munificence)and organizational resources(cost stickiness,size,ownership)to explore the relationship between strategy configuration,competitive advantage,and organizational resilience based on 2,180 balanced panel data samples of 545 A-share listed Chinese manufacturing companies from 2016 to 2019.The following questions are specifically explored in this study First,whether and to what extent the aforementioned conditions are required for manufacturing firms to attain a high competitive advantage;second,how these conditions can be combined to produce a high competitive advantage.The findings show that:differences in strategy configurations(rather than single conditions)lead to differences in firm competitive advantage;even firms with competitive advantage may not have organizational resilience.Only specific strategy configurations give firms a competitive advantage and organizational resilience.Specific findings include:First,there are ten strategy configurations that give Chinese manufacturing firms a significant competitive advantage,which can be further classified into five models:resource-dependent model(Kailuan Energy);multi-expansionary model(HT-SAAE);cost-leading model(Zhejiang Hailiang);cost-diversification model(Santai Holdings);and difference-diversification model(Kanxin New Materials).Second,a significant competitive advantage requires no antecedent conditions to reach a specific level.Third,although different strategy configurations can achieve the same competitive advantage and performance,they show significant differences in resilience under crisis shocks.The cost-leading firms are relatively less resilient,and the difference-diversification firms are more resilient.The contributions include:1)We describe how competitive advantage is constructed based on the configurational perspective.In this paper,competitive advantage construction is considered as a complex causal mechanism characterized by“multilevel,complexity and dynamics”,so we analyze it based on necessity and sufficiency.2)We find strategy configurations that combine competitive advantage and organizational resilience.This overcomes the resource determinism in organizational resilience cultivation research and remedies the deficiency of the resource-based logic.3)We discover multiple combinations of corporate and business strategies.We argue that the relationship between diversification and competitive advantage should be viewed from the configuration perspective and that both pure and hybrid business strategies may lead to significant competitive performance.4)We propose an integrated dynamic qualitative comparative analysis scheme.Using time-series changes in consistency and coverage,we combine large-sample panel data with fsQCA to capture concurrent and evolutionary trends of multiple strategy configurations.