Sustainable Competitive Advantage as an Outcome of Strategic Thinking: Evidence from Review of Literature

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Date
2024-03
Authors
Ndei, Florence Muthoni
Kinyua, Godfrey Muigai
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
IJERN
Abstract
In the rapidly evolving market industry of the modern business world, the concept of sustainable competitive advantage has emerged as a key determinant of the level of firms’ success. Sustainable competitive advantage grows fundamentally out of the firm’s efforts to provide valuable, rare, nonimitable and non-substitutable services with the firms having the ability to utilize the organizational capabilities and resources. In the era of constant changes in conditions of business environment, firms must implement practices that establish competitive advantage in the long run. Use of traditional methods to make organizational decisions has been deemed unsuccessful due to complexity and dynamism in the business environment. It is therefore important and potentially beneficial for firms to embrace strategic thinking as a more reliable way of making determination and charting the path for creating customer value. Indeed, strategic thinking has been praised as potentially being able to confer a firm with the ability to envision and anticipate its desired future and realistically connect this future with present state of the enterprise. This study sought to review the existing conceptual, theoretical and empirical literature in strategic thinking and sustainable competitive advantage as well as propose theoretical model that guide research in these phenomena. Through extensive review of literature, this study has clearly demonstrated that sustainable competitive advantage is among the dominant outcomes of strategic thinking. This study also adopted resource-based view and dynamic capabilities theory as theoretical underpinnings of the constructs of strategic thing and sustainable competitive advantage. A review of both theoretical and empirical literature revealed various research gaps on the construct of strategic thinking and sustainable competitive advantage. The review identified lack of consensus in conceptualization and measurement of strategic thinking and sustainable competitive advantage. A theoretical model was developed to serve as a guide for future research work seeking to provide empirical evidence of the causal link between strategic thinking and sustainable competitive advantage in diverse contexts in order to form a reliable basis for guiding policy development and practice regarding these key organizational phenomena.
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Article
Keywords
Strategic Thinking, Competitive Advantage and Sustainable Competitive Advantage
Citation
Ndei, F. M., & Kinyua, G. M. Sustainable Competitive Advantage as an Outcome of Strategic Thinking: Evidence from Review of Literature.