EXPLORING FIRM STRATEGIC ORIENTATIONS : A COMPLEMENTARITY PERSPECTIVE

A firm’s strategic orientation is a critical component of its organizational culture as it shapes its strategies, operations, and performance. Firms face meaningful trade-offs when they adopt traditional or emerging strategic approaches. Thus, a better understanding of various strategic orientations and their interplay is critical to guide scholars investigating organizational culture and senior executives looking to determine the appropriate strategic orientation(s) for their firms. This dissertation consists of two separate but interrelated essays, which investigate the concept of network centricity – an emerging firm strategic orientation reflecting the recent developments in information technology – as well as its interplay with other firm orientations and performance.Leveraging the resource-based view and the VRIO framework, the first essay examines the relative impacts of customer centricity and competitor centricity on innovativeness, market position, and financial position. I apply advanced meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) techniques to study both strategic orientations simultaneously and estimate the model with 583 effect sizes from 179 independent samples obtained from 171 studies. This study also explores why some firms benefit more or less from customer or competitor centricity under various environmental conditions. The second essay develops the concept of network centricity. I examine its individual performance outcomes as well as its interplay with customer centricity and competitor centricity to explore the complementarity among these strategic orientations. Increasingly, a firm’s ability to engage in strategic partnerships to compete with other firm networks determines the success and failure of firms in the marketplace. I identify this phenomenon as network centricity and define it as a set of company-wide values, norms, and beliefs that promote the development of firm’s long-term multilateral partnerships with other organizations. I offer conceptualization and operationalization of the firm’s network centricity and leverage data from multiple sources (Medtrack pharmaceutical business intelligence database, text analysis of the letters to shareholders in firm annual reports, Compustat) to explore the effects of complementarity of network centricity, customer centricity, and competitor centricity on firm performance.