Managing the fit between the views of competitive strategy and the strategic role of service operations

Bob Lillis and Mike Sweeney

European Management Journal, 2013, vol. 31, issue 6, 564-590

Abstract: Previous research has verified the positive impact that internal strategic fit can have on business performance. However, many service organizations experience the difficulty of managing the fit between competitive and operations’ strategies. Inherent within the problem has been insufficient understanding of the substantive relationships between the dimensions of competitive and operations’ strategies. The purpose of this service-based business research was to investigate the characteristics of the competitive and operations’ strategies of a business in order to assess the degree of fit. Strategic profiling was used as the method to investigate the characteristics of the different relationships between competitive and operations’ strategies in 21 service businesses. The research results in the identification of a diverse range of organizational relationships developed by the adoption of different approaches to competitive strategy formulation and their consequences upon the strategic role of operations. The findings should be of particular interest to both strategic and operations managers as they detail a means of assessing the perceived level of strategic fit between the current competitive and operations’ strategies of a business. Such an assessment can facilitate the planning of interventions for its future improvement.

Keywords: Market-based; Resource-based; Strategic role; Strategic fit; Service operations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0263237312000965
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eurman:v:31:y:2013:i:6:p:564-590

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/115/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... me/115/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.emj.2012.10.001

Access Statistics for this article

European Management Journal is currently edited by Michael Haenlein

More articles in European Management Journal from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().