Determinants of a Firm’s Sustainable Competitive Advantages: Focused on Korean Small Enterprises

Abstract

This study identifies an integrated model of a firm’s sustainable competitive advantages that helps understand how market orientation is related to an organization’s sustainable competitive advantage. An empirical test of the proposed framework utilized data from 312 top management team members or project managers in Korea to access and evaluate resource input levels, organizational capabilities, and overall environmental contexts; it indicates that market and technological resource input and marketing and innovative capabilities mediate the positive impact of market orientation on a firm’s competitive advantages. The findings suggested that technological turbulence’s moderating role weakened the positive effect of technological resource input on innovative capability. Contrastingly, market turbulence has not moderated the influence of market resource input on marketing capability. The results call on management to understand the internal market orientation process to enhance the presence of environmental turbulences in industries, thus increasing the competitive advantage of firms.