STRATEGIES FOR GAINING COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE IN PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS : A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF SEVEN MANAGEMENT CONSULTING FIRMS

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  • プロフェッショナル組織の戦略と競争優位 : 経営コンサルティング・ファーム7社の比較分析
  • プロフェッショナル ソシキ ノ センリャク ト キョウソウ ユウイ ケイエイ コンサルティング ファーム 7シャ ノ ヒカク ブンセキ

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Professionals in most organizations used to be individuals who came together to draw upon common resources, but otherwise wanted to be left alone. However, evolving market demands have led to the need for collaboration among professionals, placing organizations in a dilemma. Some management consulting firms have been attempting to resolve this dilemma by practicing collaboration-oriented HRM as a new strategy to achieve competitive advantage, as opposed to the traditional individual-oriented HRM. Previously, organizations only did this by narrowing or broadening their field of specialization as per Porter's positioning theory. Today's new strategy, which is based on Barney's Resource-Based-View (RBV), was expected to build upon this through increased knowledge exchange among professionals, standardization of their work processes, and creating organizational competitive advantage. A combination of the two resulted in four types of strategies: "Narrow specialized field × Collaboration-oriented HRM (Narrow × Collaboration)," "Narrow × Individual-oriented HRM (Narrow × Individual)," "Broad specialized field × Collaboration", and "Broad × Individual." The purpose of this research was to empirically examine the relationship between these four strategies of professional organizations and their competitive advantages. Alongside, the research includes an analysis of the knowledge exchange among professionals and the standardization of their work processes under each of the four strategies, so as to reveal the determinant structures in detail. This was done by asking ten consultants from each of the seven selected firms to answer questions concerning the degree of collaboration-oriented HRM practices in their organization, knowledge exchange among consultants, standardization of their work processes, and their organizational competitive advantage. A one-way layout ANOVA and multiple comparisons revealed that the "Narrow × Collaboration" strategy for competitive advantage with a higher knowledge exchange score was significantly superior to the "Broad × Individual" strategy. Implications for future research have also been discussed.

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