Jun Ma
Assistant Professor, Indiana – Purdue University, USA.
Zelimir Todorovic
Associate Professor and Director of Entrepreneurship, Indiana – Purdue
University, USA.The Role of Strategic Orientations in Firm Resource
Deployments
A great number of researchers explored Market Orientation (MO)
and Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) in comparison to firm
performance. Other bodies of literature also note that both EO and MO
are considered dynamic capabilities within the Resource Based View
(RBV) paradigm. Other studies found these two orientations to be
strongly interrelated. Very little literature examines the process by
which MO and EO contribute to continued firm performance. Likewise,
any synergies associated with the joint presence of MO and EO remains
unknown. A need has been indentified to integrate these different
strategic orientations towards a richer understanding of Dynamic
Capability Alignment Process (DCAP).
Recognizing that firm resources are mostly static, while the market
is mostly dynamic, we observe that EO is a significant player in
reconfiguring firm resources, capabilities and competencies, aligning
them to new environmental certainties. Our framework points to MO as
providing value to EO actions, by aligning the same with the
environmental conditions. We find that the Customer and Competitor
Orientations (dimensions of MO) inform Inter-functional cooperation (a
third dimension of MO), and as such are dynamic informational
resources. Perhaps more surprising, Inter-functional Cooperation which
is found to be closely related to EO, coordinates the internal activities in
light of the Customer and Competitor information. This coordination
allows the organization to apply EO (in itself an organizational level
variable) across different departmental units, thereby actively aligning
the resource base of the organization to suit the environment.
Proposed framework elaborates on some of the gray areas of theory
relating to EO and MO and its inter-relationships. Further, it proposes a
process of aligning mostly static organizational resource base to the
much more dynamic environmental reality. This alignment presents,
shows the dynamic function of MO and inter-departmental integration
of EO to be key to successful implementation of DCAP to the
organization.