Search

This study aimed to contribute to our understanding of the antecedents to organizations' Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA) by integrating insights from the perspectives of marketing and strategic management. Specifically it aimed to investigate the indirect effect of Market Based Organizational Learning (MBOL) on hotel performance in the United Kingdom and Pakistan taking on board an organizational capabilities view. To achieve this aim the researcher started by reviewing the literature in the fields of both marketing and strategic management to examine current trends, limitations and commonalities between these fields and then proposed a conceptual model and propositions that can help link these two fields into an integrative framework. The researcher found that although both the marketing and strategic management literatures have accumulated a significant amount of insight on the antecedents to SCA, there has been little attempt (and hence a need) to incorporate insights from both these perspectives in explaining the antecedents to SCA and in formulating these into an integrated holistic picture, This approach is innovative because it focuses on synergistic insights from different management fields, and contributes to our understanding of how firm performance may be affected indirectly, by the marketing and learning orientations of the firm, through the capabilities it develops as a result of the learning processes informed by these orientations. In reviewing the literature, the researcher has identified some common theme underlying both the disciplines of marketing and strategic management, that is, "Organisational Learning Processes", "Resource Based View" of the firm and securing "Sustainable Competitive Advantage". The researcher also noted that in the marketing literature, the direct effect of the MBOL on a firm's performance has been well established. However, what are less clear are its indirect effects. To map out these indirect effects the researcher developed a framework that explores the relationships among market orientation, learning orientation, organizational learning, dynamic capabilities, substantive capabilities and organizational performance. Moreover, the mediating role of a firm's different capabilities (learning, dynamic and substantive capabilities) was proposed as a better explanation of the indirect impact the MBOL on a firm's performance. Finally the researcher expected a firm's external environment to work as a moderator in the dynamicsubstaThe researcher followed a mixed method approach characterised by an instrument development model variant of the exploratory mixed method design that best suits the study objectives. Being a mixed method sequential study, the researcher first conducted indepth interviews with hotel managers both in the United Kingdom and Pakistan in order to develop some constructs (dynamic and substantive capabilities) for this study. These interviews were analysed qualitatively and the results from this part of the study were used for the development of the questionnaire that was in turn used for large scale quantitative data collection. The questionnaire was sent to a population of 1150 hotel managers (750 in United Kingdom and 400 in Pakistan). 240 fully completed responses (120 United Kingdom and 120 Pakistan) were used in the final data analysis. The empirical results confirmed all the hypothesized relationships among the various variables of the conceptual framework, except the mediated role of the organizational learning between a hotel's learning orientation and its dynamic capabilities. The findings suggested that organizational internal capabilities play an influential mediating role in the indirect effect of MBOL on its performance. The results also highlighted the moderated effect of organization external environmental conditions on the dynamic-substantive capabilities relationship. This PhD thesis is rounded off with a discussion of the implications of the findings for theory in the parent discipline of marketing research and strategic management and for managers in the hotel sector. The limitations of this research study are described and future research directions in this area of investigation are given at the endntive capabilities relationship