Antecedents to Firm Competitiveness: Development of a Conceptual Framework and Future Research Directions

This conceptual paper argues that entrepreneurial leadership and organisational values enable a firm to develop, deploy and integrate internal capabilities and practices to enhance its competitiveness. While an organisation's profit, reputation and society related values are very much specific to itself, its entrepreneurial leadership through actions of innovation, risktaking and competitive proactiveness is expected to maintain and sustain these values over time. Through an extant literature review this paper examines the attributes of entrepreneurial leadership and organisational values that drive building capabilities and deploy practices. Variation of firm performance can be attributed to deployment of its capabilities and the way it differentiates itself from others. Capability building and its optimum deployment in a firm establishes it better in a market place allowing it to perform better than its competitors. We develop an overarching research framework to ascertain that firm competitiveness can be gained through a series of interrelationships amongst a set of antecedent variables such as leadership, values, capabilities and practices that are due to be moderated by competitive environment. Broadly, we argue that organisational resources and capabilities are steered by leadership and values which drive competitive advantage that in turn helps gaining competitiveness. Eight propositions are developed to reflect this relationship amongst these organisational variables. Measures of constructs and their sources are explored which will be the focus of a survey as future course of action