Integrative Managerial Capabilities; a New Managerial Mechanism to Achieve a Firm Competitive Response

Aims: Companies that should operate in competitive business environments must be able to sustain competitive responses over time. Making such responses, however, typically necessitates the firm's managerial capacity to constantly integrate its properties, ensuring that they are all matched with changing market needs. Based on the literature of Knowledge Management and Dynamic managerial capabilities, this paper contributes to our understanding by developing an Integrative Managerial Capabilities concept, which refers to “managers’ ability to orchestrate a firm resource base through the processes of search, selection, configuration and deployment to achieve and sustain a firm competitive response”. Integration mechanisms are described which provide a key managerial capability. According to the literature on strategic management, limited past studies research has focused on facets of the firm's integrative capabilities. In the current literature, there is a notable lack of comprehensive insight into how companies actually orchestrate "integrate" resources and principal to achieve sustained success in complex environments. Method/Approach: To answer the research questions, the study employed two data collection strategies: qualitative interviews; “semi-structured interviews”, and an openended survey, “online questionnaire”. Findings: The relationship among managerial integrative capabilities and various levels of a firm's systemic structure, in particular, has never been clearly explained. The research concludes that the incorporation process is highly relevant to the case study examples, and that middle management can be seen to have a substantial effect on company change as a result of top and lower-level management integration. Originality: this study argued that better and faster integration between the three main integrative mechanisms “search and selection, configuration and deployment” should itself be a potential source of sustained competitive respond; and that usually that integration will need to traverse “high, middle, and low managerial levels” of management structure. Implications: we recommend that future research into managerial integration processes, such as particular types of transition programs, be undertaken.