engleski

Organization as a Source of Competitive Advantage: Case of Croatia

In today’ s turbulent environment one of the main interests of any enterprise is to achieve competitive advantage and to outperform others due to its ability to create more value from resource used. Organization design as an organization archetype has been recognized as a possible source of competitive advantage by academics and practitioners. Thus organizations strive to adapt their organization design to external environment in order to benefit from organization design as a source of competitive advantage. This paper is based on the exploration of possibilities for organization structure to be a source of competitive advantage in Croatian enterprises. The survey was performed in Croatia by the end of 2004 and in the first three months of 2005. The sample includes 350 Croatian enterprises whose top managers received the questionnaires. Questionnaire return rate was 18% and included different branches of economy. Extensive research has showed the following: organization is recognized as a source of competitive advantage by Croatian enterprises, although statistical evidence that organization design and competitive advantage are interdependent was not found. Even though the relationship among strategy and structure is important, the compatibility among organizational structure and strategy is not statistically related with competitive advantage in Croatian enterprises.

organization; competitive advantage; Croatian firm

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