SYSTEMIC REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMPETITIVE CAPABILITY: LESSONS FROM A NEW ZEALAND STUDY OF COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

摘要

In summary, we note these exemplar organisations highlight the importance of environmental change and opportunity as possible triggers for organisational learning, responsiveness and change. They also highlight the importance of S4 sense making of such change, the necessary acceptance of S5 directional change within the system, and an accommodation of change which may be facilitated or limited by existing capabilities and internal structures, as determinants for the evolution of competitive capability. The multi-disciplinary makeup of the project team accords with Gioia and Pitre's (1990) approach to theory building and with their description of what constitutes theory. Whilst the project team has attempted to accommodate different paradigmatic assumptions and the consequent multiple perspectives that emerge from use of the different disciplinary frameworks underpinned by those assumptions, this paper has merely outlined some of the findings that have emerged from a viable systems perspective and how they have contributed to a more comprehensive or synthetic view of the organisational processes and circumstances involved in the evolution of competitive capability. Whether Beer's framework, which has been mainly used in other studies to effect snapshot assessments of organisational design and effectiveness, is the most appropriate systems vehicle for the examination of the learning and adaptive processes involved in the evolution of organisational capability has been considered in other work (Brocklesby, 2001) but is not discussed here. Nevertheless, we affirm that Beer's framework has been useful in providing insight about the systemic competitive capabilities that are conserved, emerge or evolve as organisations' attempts to survive are impacted upon by internal structures, and internal and external dynamics and forces.