An empirical assessment of relational competitive advantage in professional ship management

摘要

Intense competition in many sectors across the maritime industryand in profes- sional ship management in particular, means that thequest for achieving compe- titiveness will continue and intensify. Areview of the current strategies across many sectors of the industryindicates the importance of forging stable partner- ships for theachievement of competitiveness. Considering that the capability toform a relationship is an intangible resource (as depicted inresource-advantage theory), an empirical assessment in the context ofship management was under- taken. The assessment aimed to identifythe type of relationships present in ship management, and succeededin classifying those relationships into four distinct groups. Thecentral thesis of the paper is that maritime organizations ingeneral, and ship management companies in particular, may utilizetheir intangible rela- tional resources in order to achievecompetitive advantage. Based on the classi- fication of shipmanagement relationships, implications for managers are discussed.