The Impact of Integration of Industry 4.0 and Internal Organizational Forces on Sustaining Competitive Advantages and Achieving Strategic Objectives

Abstract

Adopting and implementing the Industry 4.0 strategy to increase the overall performance of the organization became one of the main aims of organizations. However, ignoring the linkages between implementing strategic decisions and organizational internal factors/forces can endanger and shrink its performance, competitive advantages, and thus its strategic success. In this context, many companies failed to achieve the expected benefits of adopting the Industry 4.0 strategy. Therefore, the gained advantages of adopting the Industry 4.0 strategy should be sustained through perfect and comprehensive integration between Industry 4.0 concepts and the accompanying upgrades and changes in the organizational internal factors/forces. This will capitalize on organizations’ internal strengths and avoid weaknesses or turn them into strengths. In this paper, a conceptual model is proposed to investigate the relation between Industry 4.0 and internal organizational forces and examine their impacts on the sustainable competitive advantages of the organization. In the hypothesized model, three innovation capabilities (i.e., technological, economic, and commercial innovation) have been used to mediate the relation between the internal forces and the sustainable competitive advantages in parallel with Industry 4.0 adoption. The model and the proposed hypotheses have been simulated and tested using partial least squares structural equations modeling software called SmartPLS. The sample size used is 125 responses from different manufacturing fields. The results demonstrate the significant role that the internal organizational forces play in maintaining and sustaining the organization’s competitive advantages in combination with Industry 4.0.