Almost 30 years after the introduction of the CIO position, the ideal CIO reporting structure (whether the CIO should report to the CEO or the CFO) is yet to be identified. There is an intuitive ...assumption among some proponents of IT that the CIO should always report to the CEO to promote the importance of IT and the CIO's clout in the firm, while some adversaries of IT call for a CIO—CFO reporting structure to keep a tab on IT spending. However, we challenge these two ad hoc prescriptions by arguing that neither CIO reporting structure is necessarily optimal, and that the CIO reporting structure should not be used to gauge the strategic role of IT in the firm. First, extending the strategy—structure paradigm, we propose that a firm's strategic positioning (differentiation or cost leadership) should be a primary determinant of its CIO reporting structure. We hypothesize that differentiators are more likely to have their CIO report to the CEO in order to pursue IT initiatives that help the firm's differentiation strategy. We also hypothesize that cost leaders are more likely to have their CIO report to the CFO to lead IT initiatives to facilitate the firm's cost leadership strategy. Second, extending the alignment—fit view, we propose that firms that align their CIO reporting structure with their strategic positioning (specifically, differentiation with a CIO—CEO reporting structure and cost leadership with a CIO—CFO reporting structure) will have superior future performance. Longitudinal data from two periods (1990–1993 and 2006) support the proposed hypotheses, validating the relationship between a firm's strategic positioning and its CIO reporting structure, and also the positive impact of their alignment on firm performance. These results challenge the ad hoc prescriptions about the CIO reporting structure, demonstrating that a CIO—CEO reporting structure is only superior for differentiators and a CIO—CFO reporting structure is superior only for cost leaders. The CIO reporting structure must, therefore, be designed to align with the firm's strategic positioning, independent of whether IT plays a key strategic role in the firm.
Purpose The purpose of this study is to identify the impact of Michel Porter's generic business-level strategies adopted by the organisation on its employer branding strategy. Based on the expert’s ...opinion and insights, this study aims to determine the extent to which the employer branding strategy, its inherent significance, the requisite investment and the used tactics are influenced by the organisation's business strategy. Design/methodology/approach Considering a phenomenological research design, this study adopted semi-structured interviews as a means to gather qualitative data from a purposive sample comprising HR professionals. The collected data were subjected to thematic analysis, enabling the identification of recurring themes and patterns. Findings and conclusions were subsequently derived in accordance with the outcomes of the thematic analysis. Findings The study revealed that the significance, nature, challenges and ways of implementation of employer branding strategies vary depending on the type of business strategy adopted by the organisation. While organisations pursuing a differentiation strategy heavily invest in employer branding and placing considerable efforts into developing an appealing employee value proposition, companies pursuing cost leadership invest relatively less in employer branding by implementing cost-effective tactics. Companies implementing a focus strategy demonstrate a moderate level of investment in employer branding initiatives. Research limitations/implications The study is limited to IT, manufacturing and banking sectors only. Additionally, the sample of the study is limited. Practical implications Employer branding as a strategy has been widely explored in the recent past. Similarly, Michel Porters’ generic strategies have also been widely researched. However, the interconnection between these two levels of strategies presents novel perspectives for business strategists and HR professionals involved in the formulation and implementation of HR strategies. This linkage provides valuable insights that facilitate effective decision-making in relation to employer branding strategies, enabling organisations to prioritise their objectives more effectively. Originality/value The existing literature lacks research that investigates the connection between employer branding strategy and business strategy. Hence, this study represents a pioneering effort that aims to explore this unexplored linkage. Further, this research effort has also uncovered previously uninvestigated findings concerning the comparative analysis of employer branding strategies across different sectors while examining the connection between business strategy and employer branding strategy.
Despite the influence and resources that large firms possess, small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) can find great success of their own when they find a niche with a sustainable competitive ...advantage. The literature has extensively discussed how SMEs can demand a price premium in a consumer segment based on focus differentiation. This paper explores how SMEs focus-based competitive advantage relies upon on competency-based factors that support their strategy. First, they have a non-scalable core competency that global firms cannot easily recreate due to their large size. Second, the emphasis for SMEs are on people or differentiation-based process core competencies, which also tend to be the most non-scalable. Third, SMEs find growth by shifting away from a niche to a differentiation strategy (if their core competency is scalable) or leveraging their non-scalable core competency to find a “string of opportunities” that are too small for large firms to notice separately, but taken together form a decent size business.
Based on the case study of an SME company in the United Kingdom (which we will call SweetStar Cloud), this paper examines the attempts of the company to achieve significant strategic change. The ...company is attempting to move from being a tradition managed service provider of Information Services towards becoming a significant influencer in the market for digital services in the UK. As part of a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP), a local UK University has been closely involved in developing this new strategic direction and it is well poised to present and analyse the story. From the use of tried and tested strategic tools, including Porter’s Generic Strategies and segmentation and targeting, the company has also embraced digital-specific approaches for developing partnerships with clients, developing pilot projects and experimenting with its use of social media. At the heart of this research is an analysis of the move from push marketing towards models of attraction. This paper aims to explore how traditional strategic tools are still applicable in the digital era alongside new tactical approaches in the digital sector. This aim has led to an approach to business that is responsible, in terms of moving away from a traditional push-selling model to one of partnership with customers at a strategic level. Strategy in dynamic markets often highlights responsiveness as a key success factor. The ability to respond (a response-ability) requires more agile companies. As SweetStar Cloud has developed its strategy, it has focused in achieving this more effective ability to respond through a more collaborative approach. In this sense, agile response-ability converges with business responsibility, as new abilities in communication, cooperation and trust development become key.
Research Summary: This article proposes a formal organizational economics approach to strategic management. Using a Property Rights Theory (PRT) framework, it rationalizes and provides a constructive ...contribution to two of the main strategy theories: the Resource-Based View (RBV) and Porter Generic Strategies (PGS). The article shows that the welfare maximizing PRT conditions that characterize the existence and boundaries of a firm parallel both the RBV and Porter conditions for a sustainable competitive advantage, and provides a formal rationalization of Barney's categorization of resources and Porter's generic strategies. The article reveals some underexplored aspects of current informal theories, and extends their scope with the integration of strategic networks of complementors and social welfare considerations, opening up new avenues for research. Managerial Summary: This article brings two new insights for managers. First, showing that a firm can garner rents when it is a socially optimal form of organization for the assets it controls, it rationalizes the importance of control and adds a social welfare perspective to strategy. The Resource-Based View (RBV) and Porter Generic Strategies (PGS), besides theories of competitive advantage, can also be viewed as theories of control. Second, taking into consideration the growing importance of networks and complementors in the knowledge economy, this article highlights the strategic importance of two resource characteristics—collaborative and easy to combine—and opens up new doors for the consideration of two business strategies for managers—platform and coordinationin—addition to the traditional cost, differentiation, and focus strategies.
We develop an approach to analyzing the sustainability of competitive advantage that emphasizes demand-side factors. We extend the added-value approach to business strategy by introducing an explicit ...treatment of how firms create value for consumers. This allows us to characterize how consumer heterogeneity and marginal utility from performance improvements on the demand side interact with resource heterogeneity and improving technologies on the supply side. Using this approach, we address a variety of questions including whether technology substitutions will be permanent or transitory; the sequence in which new technologies attack different market segments; how rents from different types of resources change over time; whether decreasing marginal utility and imitation give rise to similar rent profiles; the extent of synergies within a firm's resource portfolio; the emergence of new generic strategies; and the conditions that support strategic diversity in a market. Our focus on consumer utility and value creation complements the traditional focus in the strategy literature on competition and value capture.
The rising competition and social media usage increased the importance of university brand personality and strategic marketing in higher education. This study explores the interrelationships between ...brand-generated content (BGC) and user-generated content (UGC) on social media and universities' competitive strategy and brand personality. BGC that included four universities' tweets and UGC that consisted of consumer comments were analyzed by content and correspondence analysis in R programming language. The findings indicated that BGC was in alignment with universities' generic strategies. BGC-UGC dispersions across brand personality were in alignment for the differentiator university, while there was a mismatch between BGC and UGC for low-cost universities. The differentiator university was associated with being prestigious, cosmopolitan, and conscientious, while the low-cost universities were associated with sincerity. The findings supported the applicability of generic business strategies to the higher education context and showed the strategic link between brand personality and the pursued generic strategy.
Business model design needs to encounter increasing and highly dynamic challenges due to counter-caesural environmental changes. Empirical research on strategic sustainability is expected to provide ...guidance for needed dynamic transformation and sustainability. The reported research builds on a multi-case research of four German wine estates. The cases each represent a specific generic strategic grouping and distinct business models and are thereby suited to analyse sustainability by leaning on the concept of dynamic capabilities. Sustainability was examined as a strategic vehicle for innovation in the wine industry and a nuanced view of dynamic capabilities. Premium strategist turned out to strongly engage and profile in sustainability with aligned dynamic capabilities as a building block to generate premium products. Quality leadership also leverages product quality with comprehensive dynamic capabilities aiming for sustainability by building on size and a professional structure but less on environmental profiling. The price–value strategy approaches sustainability primarily from a market-based and circular economy view. Niche strategist’s dynamic capabilities in the analysed population illustrated an entrepreneurial and effectuation-based approach with specific dynamic capabilities fine-tuned to exploit market opportunities. The multi-case analyses thereby allowed us to identify strategy-specific and business-model-suiting capabilities.
This study examines the possible impact of Generic Competitive Strategies, Cost Leadership, Differentiation, and Focus, on the financial and non-financial Performance of Internet-based ...entrepreneurial ventures in the MENA region. Descriptive analytical methodology and exploratory research design, consisting of qualitative then quantitative approaches, were utilized. After qualitative semi-structured interviews, a five-point Likert scale questionnaire was sent to Internet-based entrepreneurial ventures. SPSS was used to describe and analyse the data of 201 filtered and screened questionnaires. The results indicate that all of the examined generic competitive strategies have positive direct impacts on the performance of Internet-based entrepreneurial ventures. Differentiation strategies have the highest impact on the performance of Internet entrepreneurial ventures in MENA region, followed by Cost Leadership, then Focus strategies. This paper concludes with a discussion of the managerial implications of these findings, future research recommendations, and limitations of the study.
The managerial cognition perspective argues that managers operating in complex dynamic environments develop knowledge structures that help them focus their attention, interpretation, and actions. We ...explore the content and structure of top managers' strategic knowledge structures by measuring differences in the level of attention they give in annual reports to strategic issues and themes that Miles and Snow used to describe their main strategic types. Twenty-one themes that form seven main factors describing managers' strategic cognition are identified and these demonstrate reasonable fit with the Miles and Snow model. We show that expert raters can recognize these factors when they read annual reports that contain them. Cluster analysis is then used to identify groups of firms that share similar profiles on these strategic dimensions which are interpreted as examples of cognitive strategic groups. These groups show alignment with Miles and Snow's strategic types, are relatively stable over time, and differ in financial performance. The sample comprises 1,038 listed Australian firms between the years 1992 and 2003.
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