engleski

DEALING WITH ENVIRONMENTAL UNCERTAINTY: THE ROLE OF COMPETITIVE STRATEGIES

The aim of this paper is to explore relationship between Porter's generic strategies and the level of uncertainty in company's external environment. In order to gain and sustain competitive advantage in an industry, companies must understand environment in which they are operating and build competitive strategies that will enable them to be better than competitors. However, cost leadership and differentiation, i.e., generic strategies, are not equally appropriate for all types of markets and industries. In industries with high environmental uncertainty, it is assumed that differentiation strategy will be more suitable. On the other hand, using cost leadership strategy will probably be more suitable for companies operating in an environment with lower level of uncertainty and change... Data is collected through questionnaire that is sent by e-mail to CEO's of Croatian large companies. Such companies are identified from the data provided by the Croatian Chamber of Economy. A total of 40 usable completed surveys is collected, which resulted with the response rate of 12.05%. The questionnaire includes 25 Likert type questions. There are 13 questions describing environmental uncertainty, 5 questions about differentiation through innovation, 2 questions about marketing differentiation and 5 questions regarding costadvantage strategy. Hypotheses are tested using SPSS 17.0. According to the results of empirical analysis, differentiation through innovation is positively associated with environmental uncertainty, as well as differentiation through marketing. On the other hand, cost leadership strategy is not associated with the level of environmental uncertainty.

competitive strategies, differentiation, environmental uncertainty, generic strategies, innovation

nije evidentirano