HUMAN RESOURCE SYSTEMS AND SUSTAINED COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE: A COMPETENCY-BASED PERSPECTIVE. By: Lado, Augustine A.; Wilson, Mary C.. Academy of Management Review, Oct94, Vol. 19 Issue 4, p699-727
Managerial Competencies
Broadly conceived, managerial competencies include (a) the unique capabilities of the organization's strategic leaders to articulate a strategic vision, communicate the vision throughout the organization, and empower organizational members to realize that vision (Westley & Mintzberg, 1989) and (b) the unique ability to enact a beneficial firm-environment relationship (Hambrick & Mason, 1984; Tushman & Romanelli, 1985). These managerial competency attributes, because they determine the acquisition, development, and deployment of organizational resources, the conversion of these resources into valuable products and services, and the delivery of value to organizational stakeholders, can be potent sources of managerial rents, and, thus, sustained competitive advantage (Castanias & Helfat, 1991; Lado et al., 1992).
- Articulating a strategic vision. Strategy researchers have argued that a firm with a well-articulated strategic vision potentially will achieve sustained competitive advantage over those that lack such a vision (Hamel & Prahalad, 1989; Prahalad & Bettis, 1986; Prahalad & Hamel, 1990; Westley & Mintzberg, 1989). Strategic vision provides a cognitive map (Weick, 1979) that supplies the underlying logic for combining, deploying, and mobilizing resources within the firm and among the organization's strategic business units (Prahalad & Bettis, 1986), and focuses and channels organizational competencies toward effective accomplishment of organizational goals (Westley & Mintzberg, 1989). Because strategic vision is inherently tacit (it is not based on codifiable recipes of success), is specific to an organization's unique historical context, and is socially constructed through complex interactions among the organization's key actors, it may yield sustained competitive advantage.
- Enacting organizational environment. As systems of shared meanings (Morgan, 1986), organizations, through their managers, constantly act upon, cognitively interpret, and select their own environments (Smircich & Stubbart, 1985; Weick, 1979). Proponents of this view eschew an objective environment that exists independent of an organization, subscribing instead to the notion that organization and environment are enacted through the collective action of the top-management team, the collective interpretation and assignment of meaning to those actions, and the selection and retention of those actions that make sense to the organizational members (Daft & Weick, 1984; Morgan, 1986; Smircich & Stubbart, 1985; Weick, 1979). Because the enactment process is idiosyncratic (i.e., it involves the generation and interpretation of firm-specific, symbolic knowledge); imaginative (i.e., it involves the search for strategic possibilities through intuition, experimentation, and improvisation); and evolutionary (i.e., it involves divergent and convergent processes of variation, selection, and retention of human actions and cognitions, linking past actions with future organizational realities), it may hold the potential of sustained competitive advantage.
