Managerial perceptions of the strategic relevance of resources and capabilities and its configuration for firm competitiveness: an exploratory study

Highlighting the important role of managerial action in resource orchestration, the purpose of this paper is to explore how differences in managerial perceptions about the strategic relevance of resources and capabilities influences the resource configurations in SMEs from an emerging economy context.

Using a survey-based instrument that was developed by the Global Competitive project (www.gcp.org), the authors identify 62 Mexican SMEs and perform a cluster analysis based on firm size and age and estimate the competitiveness of the SMEs in each cluster.

The results of our cluster analysis indeed suggest the existence of four configurations of SMEs based on the managerial perceptions of the value creating potential of the different resources and capabilities at the firms' disposal. The authors find evidence that managerial perception of the strategic relevance of resources and capabilities at a firm's disposal could influence firm-level competitiveness. Managers of firms that perceive high value or importance to the resources and capabilities, considered the ten resource pillars for competitiveness in this study, are also likely to be the most competitive.

This study is exploratory in nature and intends to provide an initial and more descriptive analysis of SME competitiveness in an emerging economy context. Additionality, the study does not take into account the effect of industry membership.

The choice of an emerging economy that are often characterized by asymmetric information and informal rules and regulations provides an original context for an understudied area of research in firm-level competitiveness.