An empirical assessment of relational competitive advantage in professional ship management

摘要

Intense competition in many sectors across the maritime industry and in profes- sional ship management in particular, means that the quest for achieving compe- titiveness will continue and intensify. A review of the current strategies across many sectors of the industry indicates the importance of forging stable partner- ships for the achievement of competitiveness. Considering that the capability to form a relationship is an intangible resource (as depicted in resource-advantage theory), an empirical assessment in the context of ship management was under- taken. The assessment aimed to identify the type of relationships present in ship management, and succeeded in classifying those relationships into four distinct groups. The central thesis of the paper is that maritime organizations in general, and ship management companies in particular, may utilize their intangible rela- tional resources in order to achieve competitive advantage. Based on the classi- fication of ship management relationships, implications for managers are discussed.