Identifying and assessing the scales of dynamic capabilities: a systematic literature review.
| Autor | de Araujo, Cintia Cristina Silva |
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Introduction
In today's dynamic and highly competitive context, organizations should be "active actors" and capable to adapt to environmental changes "at least to some extent, mainly within the limits of its resources and capabilities" (Makkonen et al., 2014, p. 2707). Sensing and seizing opportunities, as well as taking initiatives to avoid potential threats, is imperative (Teece, 2007). To do so, organizations need to overcome the inertia and to promote the continuous change of their resource base (Makkonen et al., 2014).
Based on the resource-based view (RBV) framework, the perspective of dynamic capabilities (DCs) has emerged to explain how organizations can develop valuable, rare, inimitable and Nonsubstitable attributes (VRIN) resources on dynamic environments (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000; Teece et al., 1997).
The DCs view focuses on the capacity to survive in dynamic environments by creating new resources and by renewing or changing the resource base (Bowman and Ambrosini, 2003). DCs involve routines and processes that are implemented to reconfigure the resource base in order to adapt to markets as they evolve (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000). DCs enable organizations to integrate, reconfigure, and recombine their resources in timely manner in order to adjust to environmental changes and demands (Teece et al., 1997).
Despite the increasing relevance of the concept of DCs on strategic management research field and the great amount of theoretical studies on the subject, various authors have criticized this theory for being tautological, difficult to operationalize (Priem and Butler, 2001; Williamson, 1999) and difficult to be measured empirically (Easterby-Smith et al, 2009). As a result, there are few reliable empirical studies regarding dynamic capabilities. Authors plead that empirical studies on DCs are too abstract (Ali et al., 2012).
We defined two research questions:
RQ1. What is the context in which quantitative studies on dynamic capacities are developed?
RQ2. Which criteria are considered to ensure the reliability and validity of the scales?
For this reason, this research aims to identify the existing measure instruments for DCs in order to understand the context of quantitative studies on dynamic capabilities as well as to assess the reliability and validity of these scales. To accomplish this objective, we conducted a systematic review of literature on dynamic capabilities.
As literature indicates, DCs is a fundamental asset to get and sustain competitive advantage, as they allow organizations to rearrange their resources and process according to environment changes and demands (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000; Teece et al., 1997). Based on these arguments, we believe that this research is relevant for strategic management research field, as it identifies and valuate the reliability of measure instruments that have been used to measure DCs.
Main findings indicate that quantitative researches on DCs have focused on the contexts of innovation, knowledge (other related aspects of knowledge such as absorptive capacity and organizational learning), strategic alliance, relationship with stakeholders (partners, customers, suppliers), organizational capacity and brand.
Findings also show that the initiatives to measure DCs are very recent: out of the 42 analyzed instruments, 38 were published in the 2010's.
Regarding the reliability and validity of the scales, results indicate that quantitative researches on DCs lack more rigorous methodological procedures regarding scale development. As we analyzed the methods of the 42 articles according to the study of Slavec and Drnovesek (2012), we realized that the majority of quantitative studies have not accomplished all recommended steps for scale development.
Even though researchers are aware of the importance of measure reliability and validity, findings show that the majority focused more on the amount of the sampling data than on building an accurate and reliable instrument to measure the object of study.
This research can help researchers as it provides an extensive analysis of existing scales on DCs which can be adopted in future studies. Besides, researchers can make use of research findings by focusing on perspectives of DCs that still lack reliable quantitative studies. Results show that academicians have opportunity to develop rigorous and more accurate empirical studies.
Besides this introduction, this paper presents the theoretical background on DCs, a chapter describing the methodology adopted in this research, the analysis and discussion of research findings and authors' final considerations.
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Theoretical basis
DCs can be understood as an extension of the RBV on strategic management (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000). Teece et al. (1997) apply the influence of the dynamism of markets in the theory of RBV perspective. In their view, resources evolve over time in order to adapt to market changes.
The perspective of DCs has emerged to explain how organizations are able to survive and to keep leadership in unstable environments by rearranging competences, assets and abilities, which was not covered by the RBV perspective. For this reason, the framework of DCs can be considered an extension of RBV as it addresses some of the limitations of its antecessor (Ambrosini and Bowman, 2009; Bowman and Ambrosini, 2003).
For Teece et al. (1997, p. 515), a DC "refers to the capacity to renew competences so as to achieve congruence with the changing business environment." These authors emphasize that DCs play a fundamental role on strategic management as they enable organizations to adapt, to integrate and to reconfigure their internal and external resources to respond to changes in the environment.
Teece et al. (1997) and Eisenhardt and Martin's (2000) highlight the impact of environment on organization performance as well as the necessity to adapt to environment in order to sustain competitive advantage. Both papers attest that DCs are related to unstable environments; while other authors, such as Ambrosini and Bowman (2009), point out that DCs can also be developed in stable environments, as they are not about the dynamism of the environment, but about organization's capacity to adapt to environmental changes.
For Eisenhardt and Martin (2000), DCs are sufficient to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. Teece (2007, p. 1344) corroborates this position as he affirms that "if an enterprise possesses resources/competences but lacks DCs, it has a chance to make a competitive return (and possibly even a supra-competitive return) for a short period; but it cannot sustain supra-competitive returns for the long term except due to chance" (Teece, 2007, p. 1344). To sustain competitive advantage, organizations need to pursue the constant renewal of DC's as well as to be able to identify valuable resources faster than its competitors (Collis, 1994). This constant renewal of DCs and organization's resource base can be factors leading to innovation (Teece, 2007).
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Methodology
This paper follows a qualitative methodological process with the objective to explore scales of DCs. As mentioned above, the objective of this research is to identify the existing measure instruments for DCs in order to understand the context of quantitative studies on DCs as well as to evaluate the reliability and validity of these scales.
To accomplish this objective, we conducted a systematic review of literature regarding DCs. Systematic (literature) review consists of using systematic methods to review studies on a specific theme in order to identify and evaluate the relevant studies on a specific theme (Petticrew and Roberts, 2006).
Following Tranfield et al's (2003) proposed model of systematic literature review (SLR), we did a set of steps to conduct the SLR in three proposed stages: planning the review; conducting the review; reporting and disseminating. Figure 1 shows the main steps of our protocol.
We defined two research questions to be answered by the SLS:
RQ1. What is the context in which quantitative studies on dynamic capacities are developed?
RQ2. Which criteria are considered to ensure the reliability and validity of the scales?
In this SLR, we extracted data from two databases, Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. To extract articles on DCs from WoS (step 3), we used the keywords "DCs" and "scale."
Then, we filtered the search result using research categories. In this filter, we kept only the articles from management and business research categories. Then, we did another extraction on WoS using keywords "DCs" and "quantitative." To filter this result, we did the same procedure as we did on the first extraction. After this refinement process, it remained 146 articles on the extraction from WoS. On Scopus (step 4), we performed a similar process as we did on WoS. We did two extractions; one using keywords "DCs" and "scale," and the other using keywords "DCs" and "quantitative." To refine the search result on Scopus, we filtered it by selecting articles from "business, management and accounting" research area. In total 162 articles were extracted from Scopus database. It is important to note that both searches included only published or "in-press" articles.
After the extraction, we searched for possible duplicate papers. In this step, 23 papers were excluded from analysis.
Afterwards, we analyzed the abstract, keywords and the indexed keywords of these remaining 285 articles (step 6). In addition, we analyzed their methodology (step 7) to evaluate the methods applied in development of the measure instruments.
To assess the reliability and validity of these scales on DCs, we chose Slavec and Drnovesek's (2012) paper in which we found a consistent and detailed review of scales published in entrepreneurship journals during the years 2009 and 2010. We, then, used the steps of scale development described by Slavec and Drnovesek (2012) to assess the procedures authors used to...
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