Critical Success Factors of Sustainable Competitive Advantage: A Study in Malaysian Manufacturing Industries

摘要

To develop a theory relating to SCA, one needs to define the measurement criteria for SCA. In recent times, although there were many researches that were undertaken focusing in the area of Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA), there is still, however, a lack of an operational definition for SCA. There is no one agreed upon method for evaluating sustainable competitive advantage for business organizations and hence the measurement criteria for SCA have not been established despite the extensive focus in the area. In the past, performance indicators such as profitability or market share have always been used to justify the determinants of the SCA. Should both the factors play a leading role in determining the SCA, what about other auxiliary or peripheral factors that could be a contributing point? There should be a quantitative numerical value that depicts the sustainability of a manufacturing organization. The key objectives of this study are to examine the definition and the various viewpoints on Sustainable Competitive Advantage and subsequently to develop a measurement criterion that represents Sustainable Competitive Advantage. Given such kind of scenario, the initial step would be to develop or create an operational definition for SCA. This paper hence is an attempt to explore the various viewpoints on literatures on Sustainable Competitive Advantage and to develop dimensions that represents Sustainable Competitive Advantage. We conceptualized a framework to evaluate the influence of four variables namely; Effective Supply Chain Management (2) Product differentiation and Innovation, (3) Organizational responsiveness; and (4) Cost Leadership. The study is based on empirical data collected from a survey of managers of Malaysian manufacturing industries. The data were collected through an email survey, and had 300 valid responses. The analysis shows that all the four hypotheses were supported. The findings of this study would assist in defining a more precise way of achieving a sustainable competitive advantage in Malaysian manufacturing industries.