Competitive Advantage and Performance, The Role of Value and Rareness of Resources and Capabilities: The Case of Lebanese SMEs

Abstract

This research aims to examine the competitiveness and the strategic behavior of the Lebanese SMEs, through their possession and exploitation of strategic resource-capability combination attributes. A sample of 285 Lebanese SMEs were obtained through the use of a survey questionnaire and the non-probability sampling to collect primary and quantitative data. The results show that for Lebanese SMEs, not all resources-capabilities are of equal importance when creating competitive advantage. They indicate that only organizational resource-capability combinations are considered as strategic assets and related to differentiation advantage, financial resource-capability combinations are only considered as strategic assets and related to cost advantage, and that cost and differentiation advantage are both related to performance.There were some problems concerning the data collection due to the fact that the Lebanese SMEs owners are not familiar with the research. In fact, this study may have positive implications on the Lebanese SMEs managers’ decisions, where this study can be considered as a guideline that will help them revise their strategic choices, behaviors, capabilities and resources, vis-à-vis of competition and to readjust their strategy if it does not work well. Indeed, the value of this research is that it is the first to empirically study the Resource-Based View in Lebanon from the Lebanese SMEs context, which is considered as suitable context, given its crucial contribution to the whole economy. It is one of the rare studies that reflects SMEs challenges and problems that inhibit them from improving their performance. Keywords: Value, Rareness, Competitive advantage, Performance, Lebanese SMEs DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/12-18-14 Publication date:June 30th 202